Comment Import

Following on from my previous update regarding the migration to Github Pages I decided to look at the importing of previous comments and have completed that process.

I had previously thought about just discarding the comments but after reading through them it was clear that there was an amount of good content in there and seeing as people had taken the time to leave them I thought it was a bit harsh to just thrown them away.

That being said, I have made the decision not to look at implementing a comment system into the new blog - if someone wants to contact me there’s always Twitter and Mastodon.

Being a relative newbie to the whole Jekyll platform and the Liquid language I needed to do some research but quickly fell onto a post by Phil Haack where he discusses this very topic.

Static Website Update

Well today is a milestone in the migration of this blog from Wordpress to Github Pages - I’ve (hopefully) transferred all posts as well as created the additional pages such as About and those for the mobile apps.

The process has been pretty eye opening, reading the 160+ posts dating back to 2009, copy/pasting the content from my browser into Visual Studio code, saving the images and downloads and reformatting everything into markdown.

I’ve split the process across my Windows 10, Mac and Linux devices with very little friction. Creating snippets in Visual Studio code to allow me to quick add markup elements for images, downloads and the Jekyll front matter section at the head of every post has sped up the process no end.

Tag Generation with Jekyll

Moving from a CMS like Wordpress to a static website/blog has a lot of advantages but also a number of drawbacks - one of them being the loss of a Search function.

But is this really a deal breaker? I mean, how many times do you think someone will actually use the search box on your blog? Think about it, they’ve probably reached your blog via a search anyway so they are on the post they want to be on already. Once they’ve read it, how many will actually stick around to see what else you’ve written … I mean, really.

Chances are they will click Back on their browser, return to Google/Bing/Whatever and continue looking for whatever they were looking for when they clicked on the link to your post.

So, I’m not going to lose any sleep over the absence of a Search facility on my blog, but that doesn’t mean that I need to throw all sence of navigation out of the window.

Making Progress with Static Blog

Moving from Wordpress to a Github Pages static blog has been going pretty well with over 30 posts migrated across. This may not sounds like a lot but I’ve been making my way up the learning curve, configuring and experimenting with Jekyll (the static site generator) and getting my Visual Studio Code workspace working well.

I now have the output almost as I want it, I still want/need pagination and a tag cloud, but these things will come in time.

So long Wordpress, Hello Github Pages

Over the years I have used many different platforms to serve up this blog including, Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal and SquareSpace. At the time of writing this post I’m hosting it on Wordpress.com (using Wordpress obviously) but this post will never appear there. Why?

Well, the blog started life as an aide memoire for myself so that I could save myself the time trawling the Internet when I’d managed to resolve some issue or other. If it helped others along the way then all well and good.

When I branched out as an Independant Contractor I extended it to become my company website giving me a web presence allowing clients to see what I’ve been working on.

After nine years of contracting and as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic essentially closing down the market here in the UK I decided to return to ‘normal’ employment so the site reverted back to the blog is started out as.

Now, when I was contracting it was my company that was paying wordpress.com £240/yr for the Business Plan, which I needed due to a handful of plugins I was using. However, after shutting my company down and swapping payment to my personal card I forgot all about this and ended up paying it myself when it renewed after I’d reverted it to being a simple blog. Not the end of the world but basically money I didn’t really need to spend.

With that in mind I decided to contact Wordpress.com about downgrading the site to the Personal plan so that I could save a bit of cash (I have another personal blog on that plan costing me just £37/yr) - and that’s where the ‘fun’ started.