New Static Site Online!

Welcome to the my new static blog using eleventy! As you can see, my posts from 2024 on are online, and that's about it. That's good! I was losing a lot of time trying to convert the entire blog at once, and I eventualy realized that I was setting myself up for failure.

But let's start from the beginning.

Earlier this month I was discussing how I wanted to move my blog from wordpress to a static blog generator. At that time, I started checking some guides for dolphin, hugo, and eleventy.

All those guides said started by converting the export.xml file created by wordpress into a series of markdown files for my posts. I tried the dolphin converter and it only converted my public posts, not my drafts. So then I decided to start "organizing" my drafts, categories, and tags inside wordpress.

Turns out that was a mistake -- I have 600 posts on wordpress, and fixing everything would take ages. Also, as I found out later, fixing everything would lead to lots of wasted work, since a lot of it would be lost in the conversion process.

After getting sick of converting drafts on wordpress, I decided to take the plunge and create a temporary local blog with the posts I had already converted, to see how it would look like and motivate myself.

Booooom

The conversion process had a problem with a lot of the files. I managed to solve the problems, but it took a lot of fiddling with the generator's code (which was kinda fun, to be honest).

I got the converted md files to work with Eleventy, and then decided to check how it would look like on Hugo, to compare both generators.

Boooooom again.

Turns out that Eleventy, Hugo, and Dolphin each wanted the markdown files in slightly different formats. Understandable, but annoying! I could hack the generator's code to fit one of them, but fitting all three was more work than I wanted to dedicate to...

So I finished setting up the blog for eleventy (mainly following this nice guide). It kinda works. Things that are missing.

What is missing from the new blog?

• links are completely different: I gave up on this one. This blog already has 20 years, and I've changed systems a few times. Sorry. I made a nice 404 page to compensate for that.

• Comments are missing: This hurts the most. There were a lot of nice comments in my wordpress site, and of course they would go missing on a conversion to a static site. I want to figure out if I can at least import the old comments statically. I would like to eventually set something so that people can give feedback on the posts.

• tags and categories are missing: There is probably a way to use tag information on eleventy, I just need to learn what it is.

• image captions are missing: I did a quick web searching on this one, and couldn't find anything easily available. Will probably require deeper hacking.

• site is ugly as hell: This probably won't be fixed anytime soon, but that's Web 1.0 for you :-P

• writing facilities: writing the permalink for each post is boring. I can probably automate that in eleventy somehow (if I don't write the permalink, it tries to create a folder for the post...). Then linking to other posts is also boring, since I have to have the permalink for the posts too... maybe there is a plugin for visual studio code or something that helps... finally, adding categories and tags is kinda boring without autocomplete... gah. Lots of little things to automate. Could be fun.

Anyway. Litle by little, not all at once. Perfect is enemy of done.