Here we go! It has been a while. I finally got around getting rid of WordPress for this site. The amount of functionality and machinery required to just render a simple blog started to show its age. I just wanted a simple, easy to update, website. Eventually, I settled for Hugo, a fast framework to create websites.
Moving out of WordPress required the following steps:
- Go to the managed WordPress installation and get an export of all posts and pages.
- Download all the files uploaded that are part of the site content.
- After multiple failed attempts, blog2md turned out to be the tool that got me the farther. It converted the export into a collection of markdown files for each post and page. It also output files for contents, but I discarded those since most of them were old ping backs.
- Then, quite a bit of manual clean up. Shortcodes for embedded content etc. needed to be converted to Hugo’s shortcodes. I could have automated, but the numbers were small and I also wanted to reread all the content.
- Move the uploads to the right place and make sure all markdown correctly links to it.
At this point, I was able to create and bring up the Hugo development server locally using some random theme so I could see a working version of how the site would work. After this milestone, yes, a few more hours cleaning up content but now everything was quick to iterate. Once all the content was ready, time to move to the looks.
After trying a few themes back and forth, Hermit was the closest to the minimalistic look I wanted. A bit more digging around Hugo’s configuration and the theme parameters and there, a new looking site. Write this post. Upload the site. And let’s hope it does not take another 6 years to write the next one…