The last ever migration of this blog is now complete. This blog is now powered by Octopress and is a statically generated site hosted on Amazon S3. All posts have been migrated from HTML to Markdown and every single permalink (all 954 of them) have been painstakingly checked, rationalised and consolidated. To achieve this, I simply generated a sitemap of the Drupal site and compared this with a sitemap for a test site using Octopress after the data migration....
Octopress is great Uses Google to provide site search Archives builtin Tag support Draft posts Local preview Markdown markup Google+, Disqus, Google Analytics support Incremental deployment Deployment to Amazon S3 Fast as lightning Wish I’d bitten the bullet earlier.
This is my first post in Octopress. The text uses Markdown which is marvellous. My favourite blogging platforms are: Octopress Habari Drupal WordPress The BBC is a popular Web site. End of message.
Loose thoughts on the plan of attack for the blog migration: Install Octopress locally Configure S3 and install a dummy Web site. Use’s3cmd’ to upload test site to Amazon S3 Test incremental uploads. This is a firm requirement. Full database backup of existing Drupal blog Take backup of Drupal installation (additional modules, scripts). Install vanilla Drupal 7 locally. Install copy of the existing Dupal blog in local version (overwrite database ?...
I am a veteran of blog migrations with the scars to prove it. Here is a handy ‘cut out and keep’ checklist of the important things I normally forget: Permalink structure. Try to preserve the existing permalink structure to save hours of pain. This is particularly important when using Disqus (although there is a URL migration utility for Disqus). Typically, I like to have ‘Archives’, ‘About’ and a ‘Contact’ page. Tag support including a ‘Tags’ page....
My Web hosting package (provided by Bluehost) expires in October. As this blog is essentially dead (the last post was a one-liner 8 months ago), the sensible and logical thing to do would be to kill the blog and save £5 a month. Originally I purchased the domain name ’nbrightside.com’ and the Web hosting for a couple of reasons: I wanted to use self hosted WordPress without some of the restrictions imposed by WordPress....
Time to upgrade Drupal again. Yesterday version 7.12 was released and this blog is currently running a very outdated (and probably insecure) 7.4. Although Drupal 7 included automatic update for modules and themes, updating the core Drupal software still needs manual intervention and takes time. Over the years, the main self-hosted blog platforms I have used are: WordPress - one-click updates. Quick and easy. By far the best and most robust solution....
Must. Blog. More.
Well - I lasted about 4 hours without a blog. This latest incarnation is powered by Hyde. This means I can write my posts in Markdown, generate and test the site locally and then upload using ‘rsync’.
For many years, I have flitted between a plethora of different blogging platforms mainly out of curiosity, boredom, frustration or occasionally sheer bloody mindedness. I have lost draft posts in WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous and Habari due to network glitches, browser crashes, my own stupidity and a broken AutoSave plugin. One night in a lonely hotel room, the realisation suddenly dawned on me that my frustration with all of these blogging platforms was that I spent a lot of time in the post editor and none of the post editors did what I wanted....