Blog Migration in Progress (Again)

This blog started off running as a custom CMS I built in Rails 2. I was really proud of it, but it was one of my first prod apps and ran really slowly, and wasn't full featured at all.

At some point, I didnt't want to maintain the custom setup anymore but I did want to keep the content, so I imported and migrated everything to the now-defunct Posterous blogging platform, mostly so that posts there would push to all the various social networks I used at the time. Here is what I wrote at the time.

When Posterous announced it was shutting down in 2013, I decided maintaing an app was unnecessary, so I migrated to a static site generation tool called Octopress. Octopress was built on top of the Jekyll generation engine, and was really just a collection of nice tools and plugins that made it a little easier to work with. Here is what I wrote at the time.

I have been blogging less and less in recent years, as I got sucked into social media, started working again for a company that is not mine, and started a family. But, I have recently given up all social media for many reasons, and want to focus on writing posts here again.

I wrote up a post about how and why I started running, which has been a major part of my life, but a topic that I have been mostly silent about here. Of course, I got stuck trying to revive the dev environment of 2013 just to publish, and looked for a different solution.

After learning from the mistakes above in self hosted complexity, and in third-party hosted shutdowns, I am keeping the static site generation approach. But I am ditching Octopress, and am starting from a new Jekyll install. Yes! They are indeed still alive and thriving!

Sticking with Jekyll is kind of a no-brainer:

• I can simply move the source files for much of my old blog directly in to the new install.
• It is written in ruby, which means tweaking and debugging is easier for me.
• It is open source, long-lasting, and stable.
• I can deploy to Github pages if I ever want to.

It is already live, but there are still some things I need to fix as I go. I may still change items of the layout or organization. Galleries are not working, until I find or create a better image tag that can handle it. Many of the older posts are not fully visible or properly linked. Feeds might be messed up a bit. Code blocks may sometimes be malformed. Stay tuned, hopefully they are easy fixes. 🤞

Was this page helpful for you? Buy me a slice of 🍕 to say thanks!