Welcome to Jekyll! (Switching over from Wordpress)

I finally decided to migrate my blog over to work with GitHub pages. I haven’t published much recently in part because it was always a bit tedious doing code-example heavy posts, also I really like the idea of a statically served site with no SQL database underneath, you get backup for free via git clone and can use branches and other tricks as needed.

Editing locally, mucking around and testing before publishing is also often a lot quicker than waiting for Aussie rural-strength Internet to catch up …

The other cool thing is this can be self hosted easily if required. I did all my testing using Docker on my local machine.

Jekyll publishing

So my blog now uses a framework called Jekyll. Jekyll works by compiling the blog, the articles for which are now written using the MarkDown language, into a set of static pages whilst still giving the appearance of a dynamic web site. So no need to worry about Wordpress security patches anymore.

I basically just followed some tutorials including this one and and this one and used this docker container although having never used Ruby in any serious way and being completely new to Jekyll I got stuck for a little while trying to make it actually serve without a “Permission Error.”

It turns out that with Jekyll if you don’t have an “index.html” you get a counter-intuitive “Forbidden” error page…

I found the instructions for the Docker container were not completely clear, in the end I had to use what felt like a trick:

1. Generate the new site whilst mapped to one directory on my host, then
2. Actually run the container mapping to the just generated directory

This is likely to do with the fact that everything runs from /srv/jekyll in the container including both site creation operations and serving, but we want to serve from the created directory which is nested… confused much?

The commands I used for testing under docker were:

docker pull jekyll/jekyll:pages
docker pull jekyll/jekyll:builder
mkdir -p srv/site1
cd srv
docker run --rm --label=jekyll --volume=$(pwd):/srv/jekyll \
  -it -p 127.0.0.1:4000:4000 jekyll/jekyll:pages jekyll new site2
docker run --rm --label=jekyll --name=blog-test \
  --volume=$(pwd)/site2:/srv/jekyll \
  -it -p 127.0.0.1:4000:4000 jekyll/jekyll:pages

Here, you end up with the site in site2 on the host. The first command creates it; the second serves from ‘inside’ it… This is all only an issue for testing locally anyway - once I get stuff in the right place on my github repository things should be sorted.

Wordpress import

I migrated all the Wordpress entries over using a tool called Exitwp. This was fairly easy, just export from Wordpress, place the XML file in the right place and run a python script. This then generates a directory structure that you copy over the freshly created jekyll blog. To fix the permalinks to match exactly I had then configured with Wordpress, I simply had to add permalink: /blog/:year/:month/:day/:title/ to the Jekyll _config.yml file.

Out of the box the style is a bit sparse, so the next step was to add a style.

For now I have started with one called lanyon. I had to tweak it a bit, by default it needed a Ruby gem that wasn’t in my Docker image and I wasn’t interested in modifying it at this point in time.

I also wanted to show the full latest article on the home page, so I duplicated the old home to an “Posts Archive” page.

You can see the menu tucked away to the left of the page now.

Fixing syntax highlighting

This just took a funky bit of sed, luckily:

for x in *.markdown ; do egrep -inH 'crayon' $x ; done
for x in *.markdown ; do sed -e 's/\[crayon lang="\([a-zA-Z0-9]*\)".*]$/```\1/' -i $x ; done
for x in *.markdown ; do sed -e 's/\[crayon lang="\([a-zA-Z0-9]*\)"]/```\1\n/' -i $x ; done
for x in *.markdown ; do sed  -e 's/\[\/crayon]/```/' -i $x ; done
for x in *.markdown ; do sed -e 's/\[crayon highlight="false"]$/```/' -i $x ; done
for x in *.markdown ; do sed -e 's/\[crayon lang="bash" wrap="true"]/```/' -i $x ; done
for x in *.markdown ; do sed -e 's/\[crayon lang="bash" wrap="false"]/```/' -i $x ; done

Things still to do

I need to work through a number of things, but I’ll do that gradually over the next while.

• Fix broken syntax highlighting. I was using the (very good) Crayon syntax highlighter but that hasn't converted properly.
• Fix broken pictures - the images are still serving back to my CPANEL site…
• Create a tag cloud - I liked that :-)
• Create a sitemap XML

Missing features at this stage include tag cloud, month by month archive - probably wont bother, blogroll - probably wont bother, unless asked - I’ll probably try and work out how to link back to Planet Linux Australia, and comments - again, wont bother although I might improve the contact form. I may experiment with colours / styles as well.

Also I have a few interesting things lined up to blog, so that will be a good test. Hopefully soon…