From Wordpress and HTML to Jekyll and Markdown

It took every bit as long as I feared to port everything, but this blog is now powered by Jekyll. Of course, Jekyll couldn’t host all my old content out of the box. Here are the tweaks I made:

• Enabled pagination.
• Disqus for comments.
• Initializr HTML/CSS templates.
• I found the Maruku parser for Markdown was choking on my old embedded HTML, so I switched to Redcarpet via the configuration.
• Some posts linked to other posts, so I had to alter them to use Jekyll’s baseurl.
• All my old code was in <pre> blocks, so I had to switch it to use Jekyll syntax highlighting.
• Initializr wrapped code snippets by default. Adding a CSS style of overflow: auto made them scroll instead (if they were too wide for the page).
• Mou (OSX only) is a pretty sweet Markdown editor. I’m just starting with it, but I already like it.

I’m glad to have this done. The record of one’s development career should not be trusted to something as brittle as a Wordpress database. Plus, Markdown and Git are just how I work, now. Maybe if the flow of writing is a little more natural, I’ll get this thing updated more often.