Migrating to a static generated site

Chris Rodgers · 19 April, 2017

I have long been planning to migrate my blog posts to a statically generated site - Wordpress is great, but it’s massive overkill for my little blog.

I also wanted to change the theme, but didn’t have the time or inclination to dig into Wordpress.

I was considering using Wyam as the site generator. Wyam is a very powerful static site generator, written in .NET and is under active development. The only downside is that it doesn’t run on macOS, or at least not yet. I will probably revisit Wyam at a later date.

With Wyam unsuitable I took a look at the world of Ruby based static site generators and settled on Jekyll. Jekyll is the engine behind Github Pages and is simple and powerfull. I also chose to use the Chalk (light) theme, although I will probably modify this as I go on. It took less than 30 minutes to get this site setup and ready to go.

There may well be tools to automatically migrate my blog posts from Wordpress to Jekyll, but I will be doing it manually, as it will give me a chance to review them as a go. There are also a lot of draft posts that need finishing up and publishing.

I have not bothered ensuring url’s are correctly mapped, as I doubt anyone has saved or shared any of them!

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