Migrated from Wordpress to Nikola

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:

1. 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 ?
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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