Yes, it was a journey. I decided to chance my blog engine again.

But this time I decided to post about the whole transition, since I started my blog, back in 2008.

I needed a blog at the time but could not spend time creating something, I just wanted to “buy a blog” and write. Dreamhost was an awesome service for that. In one hour I bought a domain, installed a Wordpress via one click install and set up my own email via Google apps (at the time it was free).

Wordpress is a good blog engine, it just works. You have to keep it updated because of security risks, but it works. I wrote some plugins and customized themes during the years I used it and it worked just fine. Please, don’t say bad things about Wordpress, it solved more problems and is great for so many people. :)

After some years I decided it was time to cancel my Dreamhost account. I had just some small websites there and all of them could become static pages. That’s what I did.

All my website were converted to static web pages and migrated to Github pages, including this blog. But let’s focus on this blog for a while.

Migrating from Wordpress to Middleman

I was already using markdown for my blog posts because I was posting from Vim using Vimpress. So I had to convert all other posts from HTML to Markdown.

My old layout was not good anymore. I was looking for something responsive and used the migration to get the courage to change the layout as well. I bought a Wordpress layout and converted it to .erb for Middleman.

I was using Wordpress comment system and I decided to not migrate to Disqus. Today I know that I could do that, but at the time I decided to just abandon the old comments. But I wanted to keep the names of everyone that wrote a comment in the article.

Most of the migration was done by a Ruby script that I created. These are the steps needed:

  • Download an .xml backup of your Wordpress posts with comments
  • Change the script to use the correct file name and blacklist comments
  • Run the script

The script will convert all posts from HTML to Markdown and create individual files for every post, following the middleman style.

You just have to check every post and fix images.

In my case, it was harder than that because I was creating a blog from scratch but using the same content. But at the end, it worth the work.

Migrating from Middleman to Hugo

For some reason, I decided to not post about my blog engine change this year. I was using middleman since May 2015, but decided to change to Hugo.

I promised myself that I would not change my blog engine to Hugo just because it looks cool. And then Middleman started to work weird, sometimes the middleman serve serves my content as plain text instead of HTML. It was hard to try it locally before publishing.

It was everything I needed to try a new blog engine (haha). This migration was simpler. I just had to understand how Hugo works and how the template language works.

To convert middleman format to Hugo I used a big sed command that I can’t reproduce anymore. haha

As usual, I used the migration as an excuse to do more things. Since 2008 I change my URLs layout many times. So, I used Google Analytics to get these old URLs and added them as aliases in Hugo. The old URLs now work with the current blog.

Some advantages of Hugo:

  • It’s just a binary, I don’t have to install anything beyond that. (aura -S hugo-bin :D)
  • It builds *really fast, it’s not fair to compare with middleman (Go X Ruby)
  • There are some great features, like aliases
  • I really like the live-reloading by default

HTTPS

I was missing the HTTPS feature, but it was not possible to use it when using Github-pages, at least not for custom domains.

After reading this post (pt-BR) I found that it would be possible to use HTTPS, even in Github-pages, and for free.

The solution: Cloudflare!

Cloudflare has a free plan that is sufficient for many blogs out there. You just have to create your account and point your ns entries to their servers. By doing that you can even use HSTS! :D

Conclusion

I’m really happy with the current setting.

  • Hugo is a great platform
  • Github is fast, simple and free
  • My new layout has the features I need
  • It’s easy to change

Static pages are the future… again… haha