I finally decided to migrate my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. The initial motivation was to write Latex and highlight code. But later I found Wordpress support those by plugins too. Yet I still prefer Jekyll much more because I can then write blogs within a text editor and publish it from the command line. Literally everything can be done within the terminal. This allows me to focus on the content instead of typesetting. GUI is distracting anyway.

The migration took two steps, disigning the frontend and importing posts from Wordpress. I tried to write a geeky console-like frontend, but apparently I am very bad at design. In the end I forked Jekyll-Uno, a minimalist theme. Small modifications were made to provide better tags and hover effect, but overall I am quite satisfied with its simplicity.

Transfering data from Wordress to Jekyll was a bit involved. Somehow the plugin Jekyll Exporter did’t work for me. I kept getting a 500 error but couldn’t identify the exact problem because only cPanel access to the server was allowed and the error log was too simple. My solution was to export the mysql database from PhpMyAdmin, import it to a local mysql server, and finally use jekyll-import for wordpress to migrate the data. Actually at this moment I start to wonder if I could have saved the local mqsql database and directlly access the remote one from jekyll-import. I guess that should work.

Now I have a new blog; I hope I can write new posts as well. It may sound like sarcasm, after all I have not been writing blogs from almost three years. But let’s see.