I just finished migrating this site to Jekyll.
I’m a little sad. I ran Drupal for over 16 years, and there are few things in my life that have been constant that long. But all things come to an end, and it served its purpose well.
It’s interesting to come back round to static pages. Before I settled on Drupal, I briefly wrote my own static site generator, but comments, analytics and online editing proved too tempting. Now I have them via mechanisms that simply didn’t exist in 2005.
I’d been kicking my Drupal instance and Debian Linode VPS down the road for years without any issue, but a few months ago a Bitcoin mining worm settled in my machine, carried in by Drupalgeddon 2. I fixed the vulnerability and did my best to clear out the infestation, but I didn’t trust the machine any more.
Faced with rebuilding a full LAMP installation, I decided instead to smuggle out my data and set up again elsewhere. I chose Jekyll because I’d used it a few times, and it’s popular and relatively well supported. As it ran on GitHub Pages, I could stop administering my own Linux server.
Migrating the content with the Jekyll Drupal importer was pretty straightforward, though I ended up having to do a lot of manual fixup to preserve permalinks and redirects. I manually migrated years of content from a mismash of HTML and custom Drupal filters to Markdown and Jekyll Liquid tags, and got a lot more familiar with VS Code.
Wading through decades old posts was weird. My writing style, my self and the social environment have all changed. Blogs are still around, but many of the ways they were used have been replaced by Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr and Facebook. I almost decided not to allow comments, but during the migration I found some good discussions in my archives, and so enabled Disqus.
For theming I started with Hydeout, and made a lot of minor tweaks. Eventually I want a unique design, and although that’s probably a way off, I’m confident I have a good foundation.
There were a few more unanticipated complications. Recreating my archives and tags wasn’t possible with the sandboxed Jekyll environment supported by GitHub, so I set up a Travis CI job to build and deploy the site. I also set up Cloudflare as it was the easiest way to port pattern-based URL redirects from my old domain. Maybe it’ll come in handy someday if I attract the wrong attention.
Now I just need to make time to write more. I’ve missed it 😊