How I Migrated to Jekyll

This is a short post about how I migrated this blog from its previous home on WordPress to its new home here.

I first created a Jekyll theme I liked using Bootstrap. Then I imported the posts using a customized version of exitwp, which I modified to handle WordPress’s [sourcecode] syntax and to convert the the proper Pygments syntax. I also modified it to move all of the images locally to my blog. I then edited each post manually to remove strange characters that were left behind (presumably a charset issue). I am using rdiscount and SmartyPants to get typographically-correct quotes—and dashes.

For comments, I imported my WordPress export into Disqus. To protect the privacy of commenters, I used regular expressions to remove all of the email addresses and IP addresses from the file before uploading it. I also removed all of the uses of the contact form from the file.

And the hosting. I am set up using a domain from namecheap.com. This is CNAMEd to mattwigway.github.com, which is serving this site (thanks GitHub!). I am not sending Jekyll files directly, but rather am generating HTML locally and uploading it. I’m doing this because I want my 404 page to be Jekyll-generated. Also, I use the LSI related posts, rdiscount and SmartyPants, and I’m not sure if they’ll work with GitHub Jekyll (I didn’t try it).