So I’ve decided to replace my previous blog with a WordPress blog.

That was the first line I put on my WordPress blog, which I’ve now replaced with Jekyll. The first post on that was in October 2006, so nearly 11 years ago!

Over the past 11 years I’ve moved away from doing anything PHP, or anything server-side really. I have no particular need of the online editing that you get with WordPress or any of the other features really. I’m also trying to be quite paranoid about what daemons I run on my hosting server. I came across Jekyll (again) as part of a documentation project in my day job and was impressed by how easy it was to use so decided I would start migrating some of my own stuff over.

My first migration was actually the website for my CamViewer iOS app which was already based on Gollum the markdown wiki so should have been quite simple to migrate (actually it was still a bit of a faff due to different markdown versions).

I hoped migrating Wordpress would also be easy as so many people use both technologies. As it turned out there was still plenty of work involved. I ended up using two migration tools. The main Jekyll importer didn’t seem to do a great job of pulling the HTML in but pulled all the comments across nicely so I ended up using exitwp and writing a yaml copying tool to pull the comments from one to the other.

This blog hasn’t actually got any comments functionality at the moment, I figure people can ping me @mcknut on Twitter if they want to make comments but I’ve copied the ones that were on the old site.

My previous blog made use of whizzy fun modern technologies to allow me to host my entire site on Google Base, Google Pages and del.icio.us. Unfortunately, because it was something I had just knocked up there was no comment support, and of course it did require Java and JavaScript to be enabled in the browser.

That original blog was quite a weird thing, I tried to make it so that all the content was hosted online. Unfortunately as it was JavaScript based not much has been saved on the Internet Archive. It does seem like all the original posts are now lost but with any luck I’ve got the content… somewhere.