From WordPress to Jekyll
After reading many articles and comments extolling the virtues of static HTML (speed, efficiency, simplicity, etc.) and being a very happy GitHub user for a while now, I decided to migrate my personal website from WordPress to Jekyll and use GitHub Pages for hosting.
After an unsuccessful attempt to use
jekyll-import with my old
database credentials, I used the export tool built into WordPress to generate an
XML version of the site and ran that through
jekyll-import, but didn’t
like that posts didn’t translate to Markdown. I finally ended up using
Exitwp, which generated Markdown with YAML
front matter. Exitwp did a reasonable job, though the amount of tweaking I had
to do would have been prohibitive for anything above ~20 posts. I manually
downloaded and replaced all images, tweaked YAML metadata, had to reformat all
tables (originally generated with a WordPress plugin), and had to change some
LaTeX syntax, but got it done in a few hours.
One unexpected snag was that Kramdown, the default Markdown renderer, would not allow for GitHub-flavored syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks, e.g.,
```python
print("hello world")
```
This was remedied by switching over to Redcarpet, which was as simple as editing
the markdown entry in _config.yml.
I’ve only made a couple visual tweaks to the default Jekyll theme so far and I’m actually quite pleased with it. So far Jekyll seems like a winner, allowing me to easily work offline in Markdown, ditch my old web host, and hopefully write more frequently!