Blog blog("Baptiste Wicht"); (Posts about WordPress)

Migrated from Wordpress to Nikola

Baptiste Wicht — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 21:23:21 GMT

As you're reading this post, the site has been migrated from WordPress to Nikola and is now hosted on Github. Nikola is a static site generator.

Reasons of the migration

I had several reasons to migrate my website from WordPress to a static site generator:

I was getting tired of WordPress. It not a bad tool, but it is becoming heavier and heavier. I think that one of the biggest problems is that you need tons of plugins to make a fully-functional blog. I had more than 20 plugins. And each time you upgrade WordPress, you run into problems with the addons. In my opinion, while I understand why you need plugins for syntax highlighting for instance, you should not need any plugin for performances or security. Moreover, when you think of it a blog is not dynamic, I write less than a post a week and most bloggers write about once a day, in the computer science's sense, it is not dynamic at all. So why bother with a database ?
I wanted to use my favourite tools for modifying my blog: the shell and vim. I don't think that wysiwyg editors are really adding any value to editing. I am faster writing posts in vim than I'm in a web editor.
I wanted to be able to edit my website offline. With a static generator, as long as you have the files on your computer, you can edit your site and even browse it offline. You can then deploy it on the internet later when you are online.
I wanted to host my blog at Github Pages, for fun! Moreover, I had some uptime issues with my host with quite some downtime in the last months. And it saves me some bucks each year, at least it was not a strong factor.

The quest for a good static blog generator

It has been several months already since I started thinking about migrating my blog. I had quite a hard time to find a suitable blog generator.

I needed something:

Simple
Completely usable in command line
With a WordPress import feature
Fast: I didn't wanted to spend a long time generating the website.
Actively developed

The problem is that there are tens of static site generator. I considered several of them. The most well known is Jekyll. It really looks fine, but I have to say that I HATE Ruby. I think it is an horrible language with an even more horrible environment. I cannot even have Ruby installed on my computer. So I didn't spend a long time considering Jekyll. I also considered Hyde, which is the evil brother of Jekyll, but I think that it was missing documentation to be completely usable for me. I also though of Pelican, but I was not convinced with it.

I don't know how, but at first I didn't found about Nikola. It was only after some time that I came across Nikola by pure luck. Once I came accross Nikola, I directly was convinced by it. Nikola is written in Python and has a large set of features but still keeps the whole think very simple. Generation of the website is pretty fast. Even though I don't like Python very much, I'm able to stand its environment and if necessary I can hack around a bit. I also considered Hyde, which is the evil brother of Jekyll, but I think that it was missing documentation to be completely usable for me. I also though of Pelican, but I was not convinced with it.

I don't know how, but at first I didn't found about Nikola. It was only after some time that I came across Nikola by pure luck. Once I found about Nikola, I directly was convinced by it. Nikola is written in Python and has a large set of features but still keeps the whole think very simple. Generation of the website is pretty fast. Even though I don't like Python very much, I'm able to stand its environment and if necessary I can hack around a bit. So I decided to try the complete migration.

The migration

Once I decided to migrate to Nikola, I directly started by importing my WordPress site into a Git repository. This process is quite simple, you just have to export and XML dump from WordPress and then import it into Nikola with the *import_wordpress" command. This already downloads the necessary images and resources and create posts and pages corresponding to your site. It also generates some redirections from the old URL scheme to the new one.

However, there is still some manual work to be done. Here is what I had to do after I imported my WordPress site into Nikola:

As syntax highlighting was done by a plugin, I had to convert it to Markdown myself. This was quite easy, just a matter of sed.
I was not satisfied with the default templates so I enhanced it myself. As I'm a very poor web developer and even poorer web designer, it took me a long time, even if it is a simple one.
I wanted to add some visibility to the comments, so I used Disqus API to create Most Popular and Recent Comments widgets.
I had to create some redirections by myself for the tags and categories. This was again just a matter of simple shell commands. I filled a bug about it so it'll probably be fixed in the near future.
I tried to improve the performances of the generated website, but I'm still gonna work on this later, the calls to Disqus and Google javascripts are the ones that takes the most of the load time. I think that a static site could be even faster.
Finally, I really missed the options to have related posts generated for each posts, so I hacked a simple way to include them for each posts. The related posts are generated using a very simple algorithm. I'll soon write a post about how I have done this.

Except from these things, it hasn't been too hard to migrate to Nikola.

Conclusion

Until now I'm really satisfied with Nikola and I hope this will motivate me to write more blog posts in the coming months. I hope you'll find the website as enjoyable as before (or even more :) ).

If you are interested, you can read the source of this blog post.

Even though I tried my best to avoid 404 or problems with the new site, I'm pretty sure there will be some issues in the following weeks. If you happen to found a dead link or some part of the website is not working for you, don't hesitate to comment this post and I'll my best to fix it. If you have suggestions on how to improve the site or have a question about the process of migrating a website from Wordpress to Nikola, I'd be glad to answer you.

New WordPress Plugin - Google Visualization Charts

Baptiste Wicht — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:54:43 GMT

As I started writing some big benchmarks, I discovered that there were no really good plugins to generate graphs in WordPress (at least not free ones). Then, I discovered the Google Visualization API that generates awesome charts. I decided to create a new WordPress plugin to help generates these charts.

The Google Visualization API is very powerful. There are a lot of different charts that are available. The charts can be customized easily. The charts are interactive, the user can get the values of any points in the graphs. The charts are rendered using HTML5/SVG technology to provide cross-browser compatibility (including VML for older IE versions) and cross platform portability to iPhones, iPads and Android. No plugins are needed, only the inclusion of the JavaScript library.

The plugin supports two different graphs: line charts and bar charts. For each graph, the title of the graph and the titles of the axis can be configured. The height and width of the graph can also be configured. I also added an option to change the scale of the graph to a logarithmic scale.

Examples

Here is an example of line chart:

The chart is generated using the given code:

[line_chart title="fill_back - 8 bytes" h_title="Number of elements" v_title="us" scale_button="true" width="600px" height="400px"]
['x', 'list', 'vector', 'deque', 'vector_pre'],
['100000', 2545, 271, 2012, 317],
['200000', 4927, 552, 998, 334],
['300000', 7310, 944, 1707, 595],
['400000', 9463, 936, 2056, 1099],
['500000', 12591, 1140, 2642, 1058],
['600000', 14351, 1894, 3125, 1237],
['700000', 16561, 1995, 3686, 1208],
['800000', 18820, 2648, 4291, 1365],
['900000', 20832, 2777, 4962, 2268],
['1000000', 23430, 3015, 5396, 2585],
[line_chart]

And here is an another example of a bar chart:

Here is the code of the chart:

[bar_chart width="600px" height="400px" title="Runtime Performance - Less is better" h_title="Options" v_title="Seconds" scale_button="true"]
['Compiler', 'testsuite', 'assembly', 'linked_list'],
['GCC -O2',  6.58,   1.2, 0.51],
['GCC -O3',  6.59,   1.2, 0.5],
['CLang -O2',  6.74,   1.2, 0.49],
['CLang -O3',  6.58,   1.2, 0.49],
[/bar_chart]

For more examples, you can consult this article or this other one.

Downloads

The plugin is available on the WordPress Plugin Directory: Google Visualization Charts

I hope that this plugin will be useful. I will try to add support for new charts in the future.

Don't hesitate to comment if you find a bug or if you have an idea of improvement :) As it is my very first WordPress plugin, I'm welcoming all comments.

The site is now running WordPress 3.4

Baptiste Wicht — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 00:36:37 GMT

I just updated the site to run WordPress 3.4

Normally, you should not see any differences as most of the new features of this version are in the admin side, but if you see something that doesn't work, don't hesitate to contact me.

Enhanced Code Snippets with SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

Baptiste Wicht — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:53:48 GMT

After a long time of service, I decided to replace the old WP-Syntax plugin with a more modern one: SyntaxHighlighter Evolved.

I thought that the style of the code snippets of WP-Syntax started looking a bit old. The new plugin has several advantages:

The code snippets look better
A useful toolbar is available on each snippet allowing you to copy the code, to print it or to view the source only
The configuration is more complete

This plugin use the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript package by Alex Gorbatchev.

Here is an example using this new plugin:

ExecutorService threadPool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(4);

CompletionService&lt;String&gt; pool = new ExecutorCompletionService&lt;String&gt;(threadPool);

for(int i = 0; i &lt; 10; i++){
   pool.submit(new StringTask());
}

for(int i = 0; i &lt; 10; i++){
   String result = pool.take().get();

   //Compute the result
}

threadPool.shutdown();

For now, only two posts are using this new plugin:

The other ones are still using the old plugin. I will convert the other posts when I will find some time.

I hope that this change will makes the site better for you.

A new theme for the site

Baptiste Wicht — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 04:05:49 GMT

I changed the theme on the site. I used the Sleek theme from Studiopress.

The main reason to change to this theme was that I replaced some of my addons. For example, the breadcrumbs are already included in the theme. There is also an included widgets for Twitter.

Another reason is that I find this theme more good looking than the hold one. And finally, this new theme is more up-to-date.

I hope that you will find this theme adapted.

I've still some work to do adapting this theme for the site. If you encounter any kind of problems with the new design, don't hesitate to let a comment or to contact me.

WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” released!

Baptiste Wicht — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:39:39 GMT

WordPress 3.3 introduces some very interesting features, specially for the blogger itself. It includes a new drag-and-drop uploader, hover menus for the navigation, a new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and a new Tumblr importer.

The admin interface has add a great cleanup too.

More information on the official release notes : http://wordpress.org/news/2011/12/sonny/

I already updated the blog to Wordpress 3.3 and it looks great for now. For the first time, I didn't have to disable all the addons prior to updating. This time it worked directly :)

New Wordpress theme for the site

Baptiste Wicht — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:56:17 GMT

After a long time with the old F2 theme, I decided to choose a more modern design. I chose the WP Plus design which is based on the Google Plus Design.

I think that this design is more practical and cleaner for the users and more comfortable.

Moreover, I also took some time to change some of my addons. I replaced All In One SEO with Wordpress SEO plugin from Joost de Valk. I think that this plugin is better than the first one, but more of that, it also replaced one addon generating the XML sitemap and helped me adding a breadcrumb to the site.

I hope that these changes will improve the user experience on my website.

If you encounter any kind of problems with the new design, don't hesitate to let a comment or to contact me.

This website is now running WordPress 3.1.3

Baptiste Wicht — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:12:07 GMT

I just made the update of this website to WordPress 3.1.3.

I've had no problems with the update. But at the start the automatic updater throws me an Out Of Memory Error. But after disabling all my plugins, the automatic update had no problem to update my entire website without any errors :)

Don't hesitate to contact me (in the comments or via the contact form) if you found any problem on the website.

Solve "File param is missing" problem of W3 Total Cache

Baptiste Wicht — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:42:27 GMT

As you may have seen, my website had not CSS these last days.

This was due to a bug in the W3 Total Cache plugin of Wordpress. The minified CSS file wasn't accessible. When we tried to access it from the site, there was an error : "File param is missing"

There is an easy solution to solve this problem. You just have to disable the "Rewrite URL structure" option on the Minify tab in the W3 Total Cache options. This will solve the problems. The only issue with this solution, is that you will not have fancy links for your CSS and JS minified files, but I think it's a really little problem comparing to the lack of CSS :)

Hope this will be helpful to some of you.

Top 15 Best Wordpress Plugins

Baptiste Wicht — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:02:34 GMT

When working on a Wordpress site or blog, it's essential to install several plugins to optimize the site readibility, accessibility, performances, ...

Here are 15 plugins that I think the best of the Wordpress plugins and that I use everyday. The list is not in interest order but in alphabetical order.

Akismet - Avoid spam

This plugin automatically filters spams for you. It's really simple, you just have to install it and it works great. In my little blog, it filters more than hundred spams a day.

Wordpress 3.0 installed !

Baptiste Wicht — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:07:59 GMT

Wordpress 3.0 (Thelounious) has been released this week. I just updated the blog with the new version. I had no problem during the upgrade process, all automatically. Good job !

This major release of Wordpress solve more tan 1200 bug, add several performance improvements and add several new features :

Merge of Wordpress MU : You can now add several different blogs on the same installation of Wordpress
New default Theme : Twenty Ten
Bulk updates for the plugins. You can updates all your plugins and themes at once.
More possibilities for the themes : custom background, headers, shortlinks, ...
Custom post types
Lighter interface

If you want more information, this video can help you :

Improve performances of WordPress with W3 Total Cache

Baptiste Wicht — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:25:41 GMT

Performances of a website is often a hot topic. That's not always easy to create quick websites with low response time and without high server usage.

WordPress is not very slow but when you've a lot of readers (this is not really my case :) ) at the same time, the response time can be critical.

But there is some ways to improve very easily the performances of a WordPress website using some plugins. There is a lot of plugins to do that in WordPress, but the one I'm going to introduce is the one which I found the best.

I will talk about W3 Total Cache from Frederick Townes.