Having my website be static using Jekyll as generator was nice. Except that I couldn’t really edit and publish posts on mobile. I’ve been working a lot, and doing lots of politics things, and have a toddler, and have miscellaneous other things going on so I honestly spend 99% of my non-work computer time on a mobile phone. The majority of posts in the last year or more have been composed in whole or part on my phone and published on Medium, then gradually moved over when I had time to spend.
So, on the advice of my friend Cate who, full disclosure, works at Automattic as their 📱👑 (emoji for head of mobile development), I moved my blog to hosted WordPress. Even using my own domains (I also have an owl-themed sub-site), it’s only a bit more expensive and I get a quite functional mobile app. Plus I can change the colors when I get bored without having to go mess with CSS. I’m really not all that good at the theming and CSS and stuff.
Unfortunately while there are numerous guides and posts out there on how to migrate your blog from WordPress to Jekyll, there are none that I could easily find for the other way round. Fortunately, I found someone who migrated from Jekyll to Medium. That process involved using Jekyll to generate a WordPress (WP) export.xml file. Unsurprisingly, you can use a WP export file to import into WP too. So I followed the author’s tool and it went pretty smoothly, dumping my entire blog (essentially) into one big file, formatting and all. It did not import comments but that’s okay. They were a headache to moderate because I don’t believe in having comments unless you moderate and I’ve had comments turned off on all newer posts (and disabled on older ones). If people are dying to get to their comments, they are in Disqus … somewhere.
The only annoyances were that self-hosted media didn’t import right, all my footnote anchors broke and none of my tags carried over. The media presumably broke because all my posts had image source values like /images/something.jpg and the import process couldn’t infer where they came from. Most media I have in blog posts is actually on Flickr though so it was only a few posts. The tags were pretty quick to fix as I just don’t have that many and I didn’t even have to refer to the original site very often to remember which ones. The footnotes on the other hand was kind of obnoxious to fix and I had to go through each post and edit the HTML directly. I was going to go through all of them and at least glance to make sure they looked right, but this made it a bit more time consuming. Footnotes: never again1.
But done! Getting my DNS (how your computer figures out how to talk to web sites) squared away was probably the most stressful part because despite doing computers for a living, me and DNS aren’t good friends. Being able to post on mobile will be 💯 and maybe instead of twitter threads or long facebook posts, I’ll just write a darn blog post instead!
- As if I’d give up footnotes.
Fancy Beans 