Jekyll2026-06-12T06:02:56+00:00/2013/feed.xmlCompiled ThoughtsOlav Ringdal writes about software. No database was harmed in the rendering of this page.Olav RingdalHow I migrated this blog from WordPress to Jekyll2013-02-16T20:14:00+00:002013-02-16T20:14:00+00:00/2013/02/how-i-migrated-this-blog-from-wordpress-to-jekyllIf you can read this, the DNS change went through, and this blog is now a static site. No more WordPress. I want to walk you through why, and how, partly because the process might help someone else, and partly because — let’s be honest — a new blog needs a first post, and the law says it has to be this one.

Why I left WordPress

Two weeks ago I got an email from a stranger kindly informing me that my blog was serving hidden links to a pharmacy in a country I will not name. Somewhere between a stale plugin and a theme I installed in 2009, wp-admin had quietly become a shared resource. I spent a weekend cleaning the database, changing every password, and reading about file permissions, and somewhere around hour eleven I asked the obvious question: why does my blog — twelve posts of text — need a PHP runtime, a MySQL database, and a security posture?

It doesn’t. Nothing about a blog is dynamic. The comments were spam anyway.

Enter Jekyll

Jekyll renders plain text into a static site. The workflow is the kind of thing you describe to other developers slowly, so you can watch their faces:

  • Posts are Markdown files. In a folder. In git, like God intended.
  • jekyll build turns them into HTML. There is nothing to hack, because there is nothing running.
  • GitHub Pages hosts it for free, straight from the repository. Push to publish.
$ gem install jekyll
$ jekyll new blog && cd blog
$ jekyll serve

That’s the entire stack. Ruby felt like a perfectly stable foundation to build on, and I can’t imagine that opinion changing.

The migration: exported the WordPress XML, ran it through jekyll-import, fixed up a dozen posts by hand (mostly <pre> tags), and — crucially — configured the permalinks to keep WordPress’s /year/month/title/ structure, so every existing URL keeps working. Whatever else changes about this blog, and I don’t expect much to, the URLs will never break. You can hold me to that.

What’s next

Writing, mostly. That’s the point of all this: with no database to patch and no plugins to update, the only thing left to do with this blog is write in it. I’ve already got a queue: a post on Vim macros, one on why CoffeeScript is probably the future, and a long one about deployment scripts.

The friction is gone. See you next week.

— Olav

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