After the last wordpress update/configuration hickup I finally had it. For years I had struggled to keep the damn thing running. When I started the blog it wass all fine, but over the years it got a bit messy. It’s also quite difficult to host stuff from the default wordpress docker from the /blog/ folder. Enabling https involved search replace in sql files. etc.

So I decided to convert it to a static site wth good support for showing/displaying code.

Description of the import process

Import commando’s:

pelican quickstart
pelican-import --wpfile rene_dohmen_wordpress.xml --wp-attach
pelican content
pelican --listen

Tweaking and theming of Pelican

Example of the generated a conf file:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #
from __future__ import unicode_literals

AUTHOR = 'René Dohmen'
SITENAME = 'Reneekes Blog'
SITEURL = ''

PATH = 'content'

TIMEZONE = 'Europe/Paris'

DEFAULT_LANG = 'nl'

# Feed generation is usually not desired when developing
FEED_ALL_ATOM = None
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = None
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_RSS = None

# Blogroll
LINKS = (('Pelican', 'http://getpelican.com/'),
         ('Python.org', 'http://python.org/'),
         ('Jinja2', 'http://jinja.pocoo.org/'),
         ('You can modify those links in your config file', '#'),)

# Social widget
SOCIAL = (('You can add links in your config file', '#'),
          ('Another social link', '#'),)

DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 100
THEME = "/Users/acidjunk/GIT/pelican-semantic-ui-dark"

Theming

I wrote my own small theme, based on regular semantic UI, but with a dark theme.

You can get it here: https://github.com/acidjunk/pelican-semantic-ui-dark

Content

As expected: quite a mess in the wordpress backup. I had to fix a lot of small issues to get most of my posts back. But pelican has a great warning/error system so basically it boiled down to two evenings correcting stuff to get almost 250 posts back online.

Todo

I still need to investigate how to keep the old URL’s intact and how to handle attachments. The media/image files are nicely copied into the pelican tree: but I expect that I will need some sort of image pipeline that is capable of doing some resize/crop stuff.