I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll too. Not much about the "beautiful" part but it definitely is simpler, much easier to maintain, and the writing has been cleaner. I also made the Jekyll theme available for anyone to try it out.
I moved my blog from Wordpress to just a static html/css site that I maintain myself, including the rss xml. It's certainly simpler and I've learned a great deal but maintaining even a personal website this way can be a pain (it's far too easy to not catch a typo and breaking something like rss). Jekyll is likely what I may end up switching to.
The content I interact with is plain-text (Markdown). I use Jekyll just as a tool. I have tried Hugo and way faster locally. However, Github Pages has Jekyll built-in and so I stayed with it. I rarely run Jekyll locally to write.
Oh hey I’m quoted in this article as a cautionary tale :D
It is true: Migrating ~10 years worth of Wordpress mess to markdown that can be slurped in by something like Gatsby was a pain in the arse in my case. So many strange little things regularly broke that I’m pretty sure some are still broken. Naturally I no longer had source files, just what was live in Wordpress.
Also a word of warning – host images yourself. So many lost images (and links) on my site due to link rot. Makes me sad
But I now have all my content in text files on a github repository. The next migration will be easier.
I just moved from Craft CMS to a DIY static site generator, Ursus. I moved 850 entries with various kinds of metadata, including various relationships between entries. This is the website that pays my bills, so it's important to get it right.
It took 6-8 weeks, and I was on a roadtrip for 3 of those. It includes writing a SSG from scratch and migrating both the content and the templates.
I'm about to write my own recap, but to summarize it here: it went okay, and I love working with markdown.
The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually.
The second biggest issue was implementing responsive images with captions, which replace img tags with elaborate figure elements. I converted those to markdown manually, then wrote my own markdown extension. It wasn't that bad!
I've now been editing markdown for a month, and I am loving it. It's text in files, not HTML in a database. You can transform it with an arsenal of tools from the last 5 decades, not just a crummy WYSIWYG editor. You can apply the same rigour to the written word as you would to code. You can use scripts, regex, linters, and fancy text editors with fine-tuned plugins and themes. It's awesome to have so much control over your work environment.
It's also great to review changes with a git merge tool, to deploy content updates like code, to work offline on slow hardware.
Oh and the server has so few moving parts now. No more WordPress updates, no MySQL CPU spikes. The whole thing is so simple.
I waited a long time to move to an SSG, but it was absolutely worth it.
> The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually.
For anybody else trying this sort of rewrite, don’t rule out automating a (headless) browser in place of digesting noisy source files. The browser is designed to normalize a lot of that awful input content to a sane DOM, and you can then extract your clean markdown/whatever representation from that normalized content tree rather than from a raw HTML model (with all its loosey goosey allowances).
And if this is your own project/code, you might also introduce a few changes into your CMS template to make the scraping more reliable.
The input was valid. It just wasn't clean. It had empty tags, bold tags that wrapped a line break and ended at the beginning of the second line, and other oddities that don't quite translate to markdown. There were also site-specific conventions that I replaced (basically, how I handle footnotes).
The nice part is that I could fix those issues with regex. I could fix hundreds of page in a few keystrokes, and only commit changes if they looked right. I also fixed thousands of little things that were impossible to fix before, because editing text files is trivial.
To migrate the content, I converted the templates to output plain markdown files instead of HTML. I also had one page that was a plain text list of all entries to migrate. A script read the list and saved each rendered markdown file.
I can't overstate how pleasant it is to work with plain text files. Today, I'm reviewing 450 locations with the Google Places API. I fixed a dozen businesses that moved or closed. This would have taken days before. It was to tedious to even try.
I have had bad, bad luck with site builder/WYSIWYG editors (and not really that much luck with Gutenberg).
I'm quite fortunate, in being able to write page code/CSS. Also, my sites aren't really very active, so it's not such a big deal, for me.
I know the Medium CEO likes to lurk in these threads: I'd suggest that making Medium a viable replacement for sites that give their managers a great deal of control over presentation, could be a great idea. I'm fully aware of the enormity of that task. Just figured I'd put it out there.
There are a multitude of stepping stones between a computer in your friends basement and an app with a distributed database hosted in AWS.
Literally hundreds of thousands WP hosting sites
I get that it's not always a cost exercise and more exploratory learning to change your blog around, but that stuck out as an odd complaint when justifying a shift in your stack.
You could also try a static site generator (e.g. Simply Static) for WordPress as a stepping stone. You can even use the now-official SQLite support (https://wordpress.org/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/) to avoid the MySQL overhead.
Congratulations on moving away from WordPress - but it sounds like the decision was made a little oddly. Taking a working WordPress install and a) moving it to a hosting provider (like WordPress.com), b) installing a modern theme - should be enough to solve most of the problems without the incidental complexity of changing to a new system?
Any modern wp set-up should have great caching and performance?
Of course, there are issues with wp that may make it worthwhile to move away - but costly hosting, outdated design or low performance shouldn't be among them?
Anecdotally, I can tell you that migrating to a new WP hosting provider takes more than 4 hours :). And at the end of the day, you still have to deal with WP.
I would argue that if you want to make changes to a system, such as a migration, its the perfect time to rethink it.
Actually I've seen cases where migrating was just backup-restore, change dns. Still doing that, and testing/verifying everything can certainly eat half a day. [ed: and note that dump>convert>manually fix>build as done here should be strictly more work than backup/restore - assuming little in the way of nearly plug-ins..].
> And at the end of the day, you still have to deal with WP.
Certainly - I'm not saying one should not migrate away from wp - just be sure you make an informed choice...
I just now saw this bit in the original article:
> The cost of a properly hosted server, combined with the need for a distributed database (...)
I'm not sure what "distributed database" means here - but I'm quite certain wp and mariadb/postgres will run fine together on a 5 dollar vps - if something like Dreamhost isn't attractive for some reason.
That said - i too would much prefer something like github pages for a blog.
I had a small personal homepage with about 20 posts / articles on WordPress. A few years back I migrated to Gasby (to learn how it works; migration was easy) and it was nice (see migration guide I wrote [0]; see old repo [1]). After learning Hugo for a pro-bono project I was doing I decided to migrate my website again (see repo [2]); it was super easy and so much nicer (Gatsby boot up time & build time is like 20 seconds, Hugo is sub-second for both).
TL;DR: Hugo is amazing for static websites and blogs. I host mine on Vercel and it auto-builds to my production TLD in under 5 seconds.[3]
I just noticed this at the end of the first post from the home page (the linked one is 404)
> Privacy Badger has replaced this Disqus widget
This reminded me that self hosting with WP or equivalent software means to own the comments and the burden to spam filter them. With static sites it's either no comments, self hosting them (don't know how) or hosting them at Disqus or similar platforms.
23 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 53.2 ms ] threadhttps://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
https://chuck.is/html/
It is true: Migrating ~10 years worth of Wordpress mess to markdown that can be slurped in by something like Gatsby was a pain in the arse in my case. So many strange little things regularly broke that I’m pretty sure some are still broken. Naturally I no longer had source files, just what was live in Wordpress.
Also a word of warning – host images yourself. So many lost images (and links) on my site due to link rot. Makes me sad
But I now have all my content in text files on a github repository. The next migration will be easier.
It took 6-8 weeks, and I was on a roadtrip for 3 of those. It includes writing a SSG from scratch and migrating both the content and the templates.
I'm about to write my own recap, but to summarize it here: it went okay, and I love working with markdown.
The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually.
The second biggest issue was implementing responsive images with captions, which replace img tags with elaborate figure elements. I converted those to markdown manually, then wrote my own markdown extension. It wasn't that bad!
I've now been editing markdown for a month, and I am loving it. It's text in files, not HTML in a database. You can transform it with an arsenal of tools from the last 5 decades, not just a crummy WYSIWYG editor. You can apply the same rigour to the written word as you would to code. You can use scripts, regex, linters, and fancy text editors with fine-tuned plugins and themes. It's awesome to have so much control over your work environment.
It's also great to review changes with a git merge tool, to deploy content updates like code, to work offline on slow hardware.
Oh and the server has so few moving parts now. No more WordPress updates, no MySQL CPU spikes. The whole thing is so simple.
I waited a long time to move to an SSG, but it was absolutely worth it.
> The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually.
For anybody else trying this sort of rewrite, don’t rule out automating a (headless) browser in place of digesting noisy source files. The browser is designed to normalize a lot of that awful input content to a sane DOM, and you can then extract your clean markdown/whatever representation from that normalized content tree rather than from a raw HTML model (with all its loosey goosey allowances).
And if this is your own project/code, you might also introduce a few changes into your CMS template to make the scraping more reliable.
The nice part is that I could fix those issues with regex. I could fix hundreds of page in a few keystrokes, and only commit changes if they looked right. I also fixed thousands of little things that were impossible to fix before, because editing text files is trivial.
To migrate the content, I converted the templates to output plain markdown files instead of HTML. I also had one page that was a plain text list of all entries to migrate. A script read the list and saved each rendered markdown file.
I can't overstate how pleasant it is to work with plain text files. Today, I'm reviewing 450 locations with the Google Places API. I fixed a dozen businesses that moved or closed. This would have taken days before. It was to tedious to even try.
I have had bad, bad luck with site builder/WYSIWYG editors (and not really that much luck with Gutenberg).
I'm quite fortunate, in being able to write page code/CSS. Also, my sites aren't really very active, so it's not such a big deal, for me.
I know the Medium CEO likes to lurk in these threads: I'd suggest that making Medium a viable replacement for sites that give their managers a great deal of control over presentation, could be a great idea. I'm fully aware of the enormity of that task. Just figured I'd put it out there.
It's just that it still inserts weird markup, especially when pasting things. I had the worst time removing unprintable characters.
Literally hundreds of thousands WP hosting sites
I get that it's not always a cost exercise and more exploratory learning to change your blog around, but that stuck out as an odd complaint when justifying a shift in your stack.
So.. is it still hosted in your friends basement?
WordPress requires more babysitting.
The Programmer’s Credo:
”We do what we do; not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”
I have considered migrating my sites from WP, but they aren’t really central enough to my work, to justify the effort.
WP lets me keep a fairly “hands off” approach, while also giving me a great deal of control over things like formatting.
But the new MD-based static site generators are pretty cool, and I may get around to it.
> Per the primary purpose of the plugin...it can mostly be considered a beta testing plugin.
Any modern wp set-up should have great caching and performance?
Of course, there are issues with wp that may make it worthwhile to move away - but costly hosting, outdated design or low performance shouldn't be among them?
I would argue that if you want to make changes to a system, such as a migration, its the perfect time to rethink it.
> And at the end of the day, you still have to deal with WP.
Certainly - I'm not saying one should not migrate away from wp - just be sure you make an informed choice...
I just now saw this bit in the original article:
> The cost of a properly hosted server, combined with the need for a distributed database (...)
I'm not sure what "distributed database" means here - but I'm quite certain wp and mariadb/postgres will run fine together on a 5 dollar vps - if something like Dreamhost isn't attractive for some reason.
That said - i too would much prefer something like github pages for a blog.
TL;DR: Hugo is amazing for static websites and blogs. I host mine on Vercel and it auto-builds to my production TLD in under 5 seconds.[3]
[0] https://dev.to/whyboris/migrating-wordpress-to-gatsby-in-3-s...
[1] https://github.com/whyboris/yboris.com
[2] https://github.com/whyboris/homepage
[3] https://yboris.com/
> Privacy Badger has replaced this Disqus widget
This reminded me that self hosting with WP or equivalent software means to own the comments and the burden to spam filter them. With static sites it's either no comments, self hosting them (don't know how) or hosting them at Disqus or similar platforms.