9 ms·

From Ugly to Beautiful

65 points by mihaitodor 4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> Suddenly it’s 6 months later and you’re losing your mind The Programmer’s Credo: ”We do what we do; not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.” I have considered migrating my sites from WP, but they aren’t really central enough to my work, to justify the effort. WP lets me keep a fairly “hands off” approach, while also giving me a great deal of control over things like formatting. But the new MD-based static site generators are pretty cool, and I may get around to it.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  You could also try a static site generator (e.g. Simply Static) for WordPress as a stepping stone. You can even use the now-official SQLite support (https://wordpress.org/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/) to avoid the MySQL overhead.
  - jaden 4y ago
    Just a note that the plugin is considered beta: > Per the primary purpose of the plugin...it can mostly be considered a beta testing plugin.
e12e 4y ago
Congratulations on moving away from WordPress - but it sounds like the decision was made a little oddly. Taking a working WordPress install and a) moving it to a hosting provider (like WordPress.com), b) installing a modern theme - should be enough to solve most of the problems without the incidental complexity of changing to a new system? Any modern wp set-up should have great caching and performance? Of course, there are issues with wp that may make it worthwhile to move away - but costly hosting, outdated design or low performance shouldn't be among them?
- mkysel 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I can tell you that migrating to a new WP hosting provider takes more than 4 hours :). And at the end of the day, you still have to deal with WP. I would argue that if you want to make changes to a system, such as a migration, its the perfect time to rethink it.
  - e12e 4y ago
    Actually I've seen cases where migrating was just backup-restore, change dns. Still doing that, and testing/verifying everything can certainly eat half a day. [ed: and note that dump>convert>manually fix>build as done here should be strictly more work than backup/restore - assuming little in the way of nearly plug-ins..]. > And at the end of the day, you still have to deal with WP. Certainly - I'm not saying one should not migrate away from wp - just be sure you make an informed choice... I just now saw this bit in the original article: > The cost of a properly hosted server, combined with the need for a distributed database (...) I'm not sure what "distributed database" means here - but I'm quite certain wp and mariadb/postgres will run fine together on a 5 dollar vps - if something like Dreamhost isn't attractive for some reason. That said - i too would much prefer something like github pages for a blog.
yboris 4y ago
I had a small personal homepage with about 20 posts / articles on WordPress. A few years back I migrated to Gasby (to learn how it works; migration was easy) and it was nice (see migration guide I wrote [0]; see old repo [1]). After learning Hugo for a pro-bono project I was doing I decided to migrate my website again (see repo [2]); it was super easy and so much nicer (Gatsby boot up time & build time is like 20 seconds, Hugo is sub-second for both). TL;DR: Hugo is amazing for static websites and blogs. I host mine on Vercel and it auto-builds to my production TLD in under 5 seconds.[3] [0] https://dev.to/whyboris/migrating-wordpress-to-gatsby-in-3-steps-33oa https://dev.to/whyboris/migrating-wordpress-to-gatsby-in-3-s... [1] https://github.com/whyboris/yboris.com https://github.com/whyboris/yboris.com [2] https://github.com/whyboris/homepage https://github.com/whyboris/homepage [3] https://yboris.com/ https://yboris.com/
pmontra 4y ago
I just noticed this at the end of the first post from the home page (the linked one is 404) > Privacy Badger has replaced this Disqus widget This reminded me that self hosting with WP or equivalent software means to own the comments and the burden to spam filter them. With static sites it's either no comments, self hosting them (don't know how) or hosting them at Disqus or similar platforms.
- mkysel 4y ago
  oh crap. I made an edit and it blew up. Fixed the 404! :) https://martinkysel.com/from-ugly-to-beautiful/ https://martinkysel.com/from-ugly-to-beautiful/
mihaitodor 4y ago
A story about various options for migrating a personal blog from a self-hosted Wordpress instance to a static site using Jekyll
Brajeshwar 4y ago
I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll too. Not much about the "beautiful" part but it definitely is simpler, much easier to maintain, and the writing has been cleaner. I also made the Jekyll theme available for anyone to try it out. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
- extr0pian 4y ago
  I moved my blog from Wordpress to just a static html/css site that I maintain myself, including the rss xml. It's certainly simpler and I've learned a great deal but maintaining even a personal website this way can be a pain (it's far too easy to not catch a typo and breaking something like rss). Jekyll is likely what I may end up switching to. https://chuck.is/html/ https://chuck.is/html/
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    The content I interact with is plain-text (Markdown). I use Jekyll just as a tool. I have tried Hugo and way faster locally. However, Github Pages has Jekyll built-in and so I stayed with it. I rarely run Jekyll locally to write.
Swizec 4y ago
Oh hey I’m quoted in this article as a cautionary tale :D It is true: Migrating ~10 years worth of Wordpress mess to markdown that can be slurped in by something like Gatsby was a pain in the arse in my case. So many strange little things regularly broke that I’m pretty sure some are still broken. Naturally I no longer had source files, just what was live in Wordpress. Also a word of warning – host images yourself. So many lost images (and links) on my site due to link rot. Makes me sad But I now have all my content in text files on a github repository. The next migration will be easier.
- mkysel 4y ago
  you are famous on the google-s!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nicbou 4y ago
I just moved from Craft CMS to a DIY static site generator, Ursus. I moved 850 entries with various kinds of metadata, including various relationships between entries. This is the website that pays my bills, so it's important to get it right. It took 6-8 weeks, and I was on a roadtrip for 3 of those. It includes writing a SSG from scratch and migrating both the content and the templates. I'm about to write my own recap, but to summarize it here: it went okay, and I love working with markdown. The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually. The second biggest issue was implementing responsive images with captions, which replace img tags with elaborate figure elements. I converted those to markdown manually, then wrote my own markdown extension. It wasn't that bad! I've now been editing markdown for a month, and I am loving it. It's text in files, not HTML in a database. You can transform it with an arsenal of tools from the last 5 decades, not just a crummy WYSIWYG editor. You can apply the same rigour to the written word as you would to code. You can use scripts, regex, linters, and fancy text editors with fine-tuned plugins and themes. It's awesome to have so much control over your work environment. It's also great to review changes with a git merge tool, to deploy content updates like code, to work offline on slow hardware. Oh and the server has so few moving parts now. No more WordPress updates, no MySQL CPU spikes. The whole thing is so simple. I waited a long time to move to an SSG, but it was absolutely worth it.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Nice! > The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually. For anybody else trying this sort of rewrite, don’t rule out automating a (headless) browser in place of digesting noisy source files. The browser is designed to normalize a lot of that awful input content to a sane DOM, and you can then extract your clean markdown/whatever representation from that normalized content tree rather than from a raw HTML model (with all its loosey goosey allowances). And if this is your own project/code, you might also introduce a few changes into your CMS template to make the scraping more reliable.
danwork 4y ago
There are a multitude of stepping stones between a computer in your friends basement and an app with a distributed database hosted in AWS. Literally hundreds of thousands WP hosting sites I get that it's not always a cost exercise and more exploratory learning to change your blog around, but that stuck out as an odd complaint when justifying a shift in your stack. So.. is it still hosted in your friends basement?
- nicbou 4y ago
  Even if cost is not a concern, it's amazing not to maintain a CMS and harden it against attackers. You just put the files there and forget about them. WordPress requires more babysitting.

65 points by mihaitodor 4y ago

> Suddenly it’s 6 months later and you’re losing your mind The Programmer’s Credo: ”We do what we do; not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.” I have considered migrating my sites from WP, but they aren’t really central enough to my work, to justify the effort. WP lets me keep a fairly “hands off” approach, while also giving me a great deal of control over things like formatting. But the new MD-based static site generators are pretty cool, and I may get around to it.

CharlesW 4y ago
You could also try a static site generator (e.g. Simply Static) for WordPress as a stepping stone. You can even use the now-official SQLite support (https://wordpress.org/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/sqlite-database-integration/) to avoid the MySQL overhead.
- jaden 4y ago
  Just a note that the plugin is considered beta: > Per the primary purpose of the plugin...it can mostly be considered a beta testing plugin.

e12e 4y ago

Congratulations on moving away from WordPress - but it sounds like the decision was made a little oddly. Taking a working WordPress install and a) moving it to a hosting provider (like WordPress.com), b) installing a modern theme - should be enough to solve most of the problems without the incidental complexity of changing to a new system? Any modern wp set-up should have great caching and performance? Of course, there are issues with wp that may make it worthwhile to move away - but costly hosting, outdated design or low performance shouldn't be among them?

mkysel 4y ago
Anecdotally, I can tell you that migrating to a new WP hosting provider takes more than 4 hours :). And at the end of the day, you still have to deal with WP. I would argue that if you want to make changes to a system, such as a migration, its the perfect time to rethink it.
- e12e 4y ago
  Actually I've seen cases where migrating was just backup-restore, change dns. Still doing that, and testing/verifying everything can certainly eat half a day. [ed: and note that dump>convert>manually fix>build as done here should be strictly more work than backup/restore - assuming little in the way of nearly plug-ins..]. > And at the end of the day, you still have to deal with WP. Certainly - I'm not saying one should not migrate away from wp - just be sure you make an informed choice... I just now saw this bit in the original article: > The cost of a properly hosted server, combined with the need for a distributed database (...) I'm not sure what "distributed database" means here - but I'm quite certain wp and mariadb/postgres will run fine together on a 5 dollar vps - if something like Dreamhost isn't attractive for some reason. That said - i too would much prefer something like github pages for a blog.

yboris 4y ago

I had a small personal homepage with about 20 posts / articles on WordPress. A few years back I migrated to Gasby (to learn how it works; migration was easy) and it was nice (see migration guide I wrote [0]; see old repo [1]). After learning Hugo for a pro-bono project I was doing I decided to migrate my website again (see repo [2]); it was super easy and so much nicer (Gatsby boot up time & build time is like 20 seconds, Hugo is sub-second for both). TL;DR: Hugo is amazing for static websites and blogs. I host mine on Vercel and it auto-builds to my production TLD in under 5 seconds.[3] [0] https://dev.to/whyboris/migrating-wordpress-to-gatsby-in-3-steps-33oa https://dev.to/whyboris/migrating-wordpress-to-gatsby-in-3-s... [1] https://github.com/whyboris/yboris.com https://github.com/whyboris/yboris.com [2] https://github.com/whyboris/homepage https://github.com/whyboris/homepage [3] https://yboris.com/ https://yboris.com/

pmontra 4y ago

I just noticed this at the end of the first post from the home page (the linked one is 404) > Privacy Badger has replaced this Disqus widget This reminded me that self hosting with WP or equivalent software means to own the comments and the burden to spam filter them. With static sites it's either no comments, self hosting them (don't know how) or hosting them at Disqus or similar platforms.

mkysel 4y ago
oh crap. I made an edit and it blew up. Fixed the 404! :) https://martinkysel.com/from-ugly-to-beautiful/ https://martinkysel.com/from-ugly-to-beautiful/

mihaitodor 4y ago

A story about various options for migrating a personal blog from a self-hosted Wordpress instance to a static site using Jekyll

Brajeshwar 4y ago

I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll too. Not much about the "beautiful" part but it definitely is simpler, much easier to maintain, and the writing has been cleaner. I also made the Jekyll theme available for anyone to try it out. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/ https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

extr0pian 4y ago
I moved my blog from Wordpress to just a static html/css site that I maintain myself, including the rss xml. It's certainly simpler and I've learned a great deal but maintaining even a personal website this way can be a pain (it's far too easy to not catch a typo and breaking something like rss). Jekyll is likely what I may end up switching to. https://chuck.is/html/ https://chuck.is/html/
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  The content I interact with is plain-text (Markdown). I use Jekyll just as a tool. I have tried Hugo and way faster locally. However, Github Pages has Jekyll built-in and so I stayed with it. I rarely run Jekyll locally to write.

Swizec 4y ago

Oh hey I’m quoted in this article as a cautionary tale :D It is true: Migrating ~10 years worth of Wordpress mess to markdown that can be slurped in by something like Gatsby was a pain in the arse in my case. So many strange little things regularly broke that I’m pretty sure some are still broken. Naturally I no longer had source files, just what was live in Wordpress. Also a word of warning – host images yourself. So many lost images (and links) on my site due to link rot. Makes me sad But I now have all my content in text files on a github repository. The next migration will be easier.

mkysel 4y ago
you are famous on the google-s!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nicbou 4y ago

I just moved from Craft CMS to a DIY static site generator, Ursus. I moved 850 entries with various kinds of metadata, including various relationships between entries. This is the website that pays my bills, so it's important to get it right. It took 6-8 weeks, and I was on a roadtrip for 3 of those. It includes writing a SSG from scratch and migrating both the content and the templates. I'm about to write my own recap, but to summarize it here: it went okay, and I love working with markdown. The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually. The second biggest issue was implementing responsive images with captions, which replace img tags with elaborate figure elements. I converted those to markdown manually, then wrote my own markdown extension. It wasn't that bad! I've now been editing markdown for a month, and I am loving it. It's text in files, not HTML in a database. You can transform it with an arsenal of tools from the last 5 decades, not just a crummy WYSIWYG editor. You can apply the same rigour to the written word as you would to code. You can use scripts, regex, linters, and fancy text editors with fine-tuned plugins and themes. It's awesome to have so much control over your work environment. It's also great to review changes with a git merge tool, to deploy content updates like code, to work offline on slow hardware. Oh and the server has so few moving parts now. No more WordPress updates, no MySQL CPU spikes. The whole thing is so simple. I waited a long time to move to an SSG, but it was absolutely worth it.

swatcoder 4y ago
Nice! > The biggest issue was the conversion of 5 years of HTML noise caused by Redactor, a WYSIWYG editor with many quirks. The converter didn't know what to do with stray line breaks at the end of block elements, among other oddities. I had to fix a lot of stuff manually. For anybody else trying this sort of rewrite, don’t rule out automating a (headless) browser in place of digesting noisy source files. The browser is designed to normalize a lot of that awful input content to a sane DOM, and you can then extract your clean markdown/whatever representation from that normalized content tree rather than from a raw HTML model (with all its loosey goosey allowances). And if this is your own project/code, you might also introduce a few changes into your CMS template to make the scraping more reliable.

danwork 4y ago

There are a multitude of stepping stones between a computer in your friends basement and an app with a distributed database hosted in AWS. Literally hundreds of thousands WP hosting sites I get that it's not always a cost exercise and more exploratory learning to change your blog around, but that stuck out as an odd complaint when justifying a shift in your stack. So.. is it still hosted in your friends basement?

nicbou 4y ago
Even if cost is not a concern, it's amazing not to maintain a CMS and harden it against attackers. You just put the files there and forget about them. WordPress requires more babysitting.