Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Jekyll!

The title says it all, I’ve finally moved my Blog off Wordpress and replaced it by static HTML files generated by Jekyll

This means: No more security updates to Wordpress, no database roundtrip to display what amounts to static HTML content and best of all: I can version my posts using Git! Naturally, the code is now up on GitHub in it’s own repository Another added benefit is that I can now write my posts using textile instead of HTML, what amounts to a much better editing experience.

What changed for my readers? Nothing, and that’s not really a good thing. I feel like this blog would benefit from a cosmetic overhaul, but until I can convince a designer to help me out with that it will look and feel the same it has always done (boring). I did however clean out the sidebar a bit :)

The migration process

Oh this is where things get interesting. Migrating to Jekyll was not as easy as I thought it should be. Since my hoster does not allow for direct connections to the MySQL database using the migrator scripts within Jekyll was not an option. These require direct database access and I was not very keen on installing MySQL on my machine just for that purpose.

It was a journey from there, I first tried to export MSSQL compatible SQL but suffice it to say phpMyAdmin sucks. (It was also unable to generate sane YAML). I finally found the export function inside Wordpress itself that will generate a RSS style XML document that contains all posts and decided to simply write a Ruby script that exports the posts from the XML into html files for use in Jekyll.

Writing that script was also a bit funny, since Ruby/Jekyll fails totally at reading YAML Front Matter in any format besides ANSI. So I had to find out how to first write a file in ANSI using ruby (it defaulted to UTF-8) and then how to htmlencode text using htmlentities. Anyway, overall I have to say writing that Ruby script was really fun and I may end up doing a bit more Ruby in the future. And btw: I finally managed to learn how to get around Vim. Did I mention that this editor totally rocks?

In the end, the script is still rather simplistic. It will just take a wordpress.xml file and extract all posts into the _posts directory, adding categories, title etc to the YAML Front Matter of each post. You can find it in my GitHub repository: Importer.rb

I’ll put up a series of blogposts about the Wordpress → Jekyll migration in the near future.

Update: Sorry to all my feed subscribers for the spam there. I changed the format of the feed to atom and now your reader may show 20 unread posts when there is really only one.