Migrating from Wordpress to Jekyll

I’ve been running this blog since 2008, but I haven’t been updating the blog for a while. I’ve been too busy doing other things. The problem is that Wordpress needs constant care to keep it running well.

Trapped in Wordpress ecosystem

I also felt trapped in Wordpress ecosystem. Some plugins stopped working when the authors don’t update them anymore, or they just go behind subscription fees, which is ok, but I don’t want to go all through that, since I only want to write a blog post now and then.

I also have been jumping between different web hotels (running since 2008) and I have been swichting over different cloud vendors to run wordpress on docker container. Hosting a blog is still quite a bit of work, and those servers are not free.

Jekyll to the rescue

The Jekyll seems like an optimal product for me. Blogging with Markdown documents, and running them on Github for free. This all sounds too good to be true.

Before migrating into Jekyll, I read some blogs post about it “I’ve been using wordpress for three months and it was not for me. Here’s how I migrated into Jekyll”. Well. I have been running this blog since 2008, and I have 180 post. I wonder how easy this is going to be…

Migration to Jekyll

I installed Wordpress to Jekyll wordpress plugin and started my jorney. The idea was that I would get nice Markdown documents from the old blog those files would be an easy task for me to maintain them in the future.

Fix your wordpress plugins

The export-jekyll pluging failed with broken zip-files. I was really wondering if the zip-code in the plugin is broken, and I tried to make some fixes into it.

However, it turned out that one of my own plugins was breaking the zip-files. I had an empty line after closing php-tags in one of my own plugins. I really don’t maintain my own stuff that well. The plugin ended up putting some empty space after everything –> zip-files were broken.

Lesson learned. Remember not to leave this empty line after closing the tags.

Not even knowing what’s broken during the past decade

I have been running wordpress from 2008. In the way I have had multiple broken plugins, different wp-themes, a lot of security holes etc. There’s a lot of broken things at this point.

It feels that the easiest way of fixing this is to migrate to Jekyll and go though all Markdown files with search-tool on Visual Studio Code. Fixing stuff withing static files after the migration sounds like a solid plan.

Runing the blog in few different domains

I have been running the blog in few diffrent domains: “koti.kapsi.fi/summeli”, “summeli.fi” and now “summeli.com”. These migrations have also left a mark. I stil had some of my old domain names used in internal links somewhere in the old posts. This was an easy thing to fix once I got to the Markdown.

Broken links

Not using relative urls. This was a mistake, and I regret it. The Github workflow has a static check for links, which is very good verifying that those links / files are found in the site. So I had to fix all links to my blog by hand.

All my images are broken

Wordpress migration left same wordpress tags in md-files. Now I have every image with and all kinds of wordpress gallery related html-tags from the past decade, which are not working with Jekyll. So I need to clean up all references to images by hand.

Sis files are scatter inside wp-installation

I had lost some of my old symbian downloas while using different versions of the Download-Monitor wp-plugin, and uploading the sis files into various locations of the wp-structure. I manually searched for earch sis-file and fixed the links. So now all of my symbian sis files (which I have ever served here) can be found!

What about comments

Moving the coments into Discuss seemed an easy way of keeping them, so I just signed in to Discuss, and migrated my comments into the service, and configured them back on into Jekyll site. This was the easies part of the whole migration.

Everything is fixed

NICE! I can finally blog with Jekyll and MD files. I love it.