<i>> Suddenly it’s 6 months later and you’re losing your mind</i><p>The Programmer’s Credo:<p><i>”We do what we do; not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”</i><p>I have considered migrating my sites from WP, but they aren’t really central enough to my work, to justify the effort.<p>WP lets me keep a fairly “hands off” approach, while also giving me a great deal of control over things like formatting.<p>But the new MD-based static site generators are pretty cool, and I may get around to it.
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.<p>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.<p>I'm about to write my own recap, but to summarize it here: it went okay, and I love working with markdown.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>It's also great to review changes with a git merge tool, to deploy content updates like code, to work offline on slow hardware.<p>Oh and the server has so few moving parts now. No more WordPress updates, no MySQL CPU spikes. The whole thing is so simple.<p>I waited a long time to move to an SSG, but it was absolutely worth it.
Oh hey I’m quoted in this article as a cautionary tale :D<p>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.<p>Also a word of warning – <i>host images yourself</i>. So many lost images (and links) on my site due to link rot. Makes me sad<p>But I now have all my content in text files on a github repository. The next migration will be easier.
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.<p><a href="https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/" rel="nofollow">https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/</a>
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?<p>Any modern wp set-up should have great caching and performance?<p>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?
There are a multitude of stepping stones between a computer in your friends basement and an app with a distributed database hosted in AWS.<p>Literally hundreds of thousands WP hosting sites<p>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.<p>So.. is it still hosted in your friends basement?
I just noticed this at the end of the first post from the home page (the linked one is 404)<p>> Privacy Badger has replaced this Disqus widget<p>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.
I had a small personal homepage with about 20 posts / articles on <i>WordPress</i>. A few years back I migrated to <i>Gasby</i> (to learn how it works; migration was easy) and it was nice (see migration guide I wrote [0]; see old repo [1]). After learning <i>Hugo</i> 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).<p>TL;DR: <i>Hugo</i> is amazing for static websites and blogs. I host mine on <i>Vercel</i> and it auto-builds to my production TLD in under 5 seconds.[3]<p>[0] <a href="https://dev.to/whyboris/migrating-wordpress-to-gatsby-in-3-steps-33oa" rel="nofollow">https://dev.to/whyboris/migrating-wordpress-to-gatsby-in-3-s...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/whyboris/yboris.com">https://github.com/whyboris/yboris.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/whyboris/homepage">https://github.com/whyboris/homepage</a><p>[3] <a href="https://yboris.com/" rel="nofollow">https://yboris.com/</a>