Wordpress to Jekyll Conversion

I started my blogging journey in WordPress.com and it was a smooth ride. The caveat is that you don’t learn about web or related programming that way. And, I didn’t have time to learn that anyways and I continued using the same.

Then came a point when I realized my needs are different. I wanted a site where I can do a bit of programming JavaScript and such. Also, I didn’t want to pay a premium. Moreover having followers and such were not my main priorities.

I got a domain name in namecheap. Built a template site in my local computer following advise from this set of YouTube videos. And, I was good to go.

Then the main issue was to get the content of old blogs and site pages to the new website. It turns out Jekyll provides an easy solution to this here

Installed the following plugin by running.

gem install hpricot open_uri_redirections

And ran this.

ruby -r rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import";
    JekyllImport::Importers::WordpressDotCom.run({
      "source" => "wordpress.xml",
      "no_fetch_images" => false,
      "assets_folder" => "assets"
    })'

Minor edits and moving some files to appropriate places - the site is ready.

One should note that Jekyll site is not dynamic and comes with its limitations. Some things taken for granted in WordPress.com would need more work like having a contact page. For which I used this tutorial.

Also I think doing dynamic tasks are going to be much harder.

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