Taking a look a what I was using and paying WordPress.com for I felt it no longer made sense to keep using the service. After looking at some alternatives I decided upon using GitHub Pages to host my blog. It will force me to use a certain toolset, and it’s free! :-)
You can easily export your old blogs from WordPress.com to XML format, as GitHub Pages with Jekyll uses markdown you need to convert the exported XML first. There are many tools available, just Google “wordpress xml to markdown” and you’ll get a bunch of hits. I tried a couple, including exitwp but you probably still need to do a fair amount of manual cleanup simply because some of the constructs are not available in markdown. For example, I found no way to link directly to a YouTube video, which would appear with a preview screen and be playable inline in WordPress, so in markdown you can have a screenshot preview of a YouTube video that then links to YouTube itself.
As I’m using Cloudflare for DNS/CDN/DDoS/… I needed to change the A records to point to GitHub Pages, more info on how to do that can be found here.
Another thing I needed to do manually was provide a permalink for each page so I could maintain the links WordPress created for each blog post, I get a bunch of hits from external places each day so that was paramount to get right. I’m also changing DNS registrar at the same time so that might cause some minor hickups in a few days.
When testing old links via Twitter I found a small issue with AMP links. Apparently historical Twitter links on mobile devices automatically pointed to (now non-existent) AMP versions of my blog, which leads to 404’s. An AMP plugin doesn’t seem to be available with GitHub Pages and Jekyll right now. So to get around this I needed to use the jekyll-redirect-from plugin. You can simply add the trailing /amp/ as a redirect to the permalink.
As my editor I’m using Visual Studio Code, and I have GitHub Desktop installed on my MacBook which provides easy integration, I also installed Jekyll locally to preview changes before pushing stuff to GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages supports Jekyll out of the box for blogging so that requires nothing special on their end.
I’m still debating using another theme, but I’m kinda digging the simplicity and speed of the default one called Minima. Another thing I’ll probably add is pagination and maybe see if I can use disqus for commenting. I also still need to look at Google indexing/SEO.
Overall still some work to do, but happy with the migration so far…