Ctrl-Shift-r

14 Mar 2019

For both of you who follow this blog, you’ll notice it’s had a pretty major face-lift.

There’s also a strong chance I’ve completely broken the RSS feed, so it’s entirely possible I’m typing into the void.

I got bored of the old theme and have wanted to give it an big update for a while. But I simply couldn’t be bothered to go back to hacking around WordPress themes.

I also decided to shift from WordPress to a statically hosted site. I prefer writing in Markdown and not getting distracted by all the bells and whistles of an editor. I realise it isn’t for everyone, but pushing some markdown to a git repo is a natural part of my daily workflow already, so it made sense to move over to GitHub Pages.

The main challenge was getting all of the existing content out of WordPress.

I found this script that can convert a WordPress export into Markdown files. It also tries to download any uploaded content the posts link to. It wasn’t perfect and took some tweaking, but it got me to a workable state. Thankfully I’m not a prolific writer, so an hour of going through each post and doing some final tidy up was all it took to give things a final polish.

As for the theme itself, some trawling around found this theme that I liked the look of and it didn’t take much to customise it a bit to my tastes.

The final piece was replicating some of the non-blog content I was also hosting on there. Most of that has copied over, but a couple custom php scripts are now defunct and I’ll think about what to do with them another day.

If you do read this post, please do say ‘Hi’ through some means. It’d be nice to know you exist.