It was time for me to embrace GitHub Pages and migrate my blog from WordPress to Jekyll.

Why? WP is a great publishing platform, but I wanted something that requires minimal maintenance, doesn’t ask me to renew web hosting and allows me to publish from command line. Jekyll checked all the boxes and I mostly followed Bob Gale’s excellent migration guide.

It wasn’t as smooth as I anticipated. Even though all blog _posts, _drafts and wp-content were exported, I ran into issue where simply copying exported markdown files (.md) from _posts folder didn’t work and I had to comment out id, guid and permalink (see below). After these changes posts showed mostly fine.

# id: 433
title: Failed to connect to a Windows service
date: 2016-06-04T11:39:27-07:00
author: andrei
layout: post
# guid: http://www.rubaniuk.com/?p=433
# permalink: /?p=433
...

I did write “mostly” because book reviews used WP book review plugin and I still need to do extra formatting in order to properly display these posts.

Also, in multiple posts iframe wasn’t exported at all so I had to do copy it manually from original posts.

After testing locally, I went ahead and linked my domain to GitHub Pages and configured custom domain rubaniuk.com in the GitHub Pages settings for rubaniuk.github.io repo.

It took about 30 minutes for DNS settings to change. Note that TLS version wasn’t available immediately and after waiting 2-3 hours for TLS certitifcate to be available, I enforced HTTPS in the GitHub Pages settings.

It’s pretty liberating to be able to run an incremental Jekyll build and simply refresh your browser to see the changes:

bundle exec jekyll serve --trace --watch --incremental

I still need to figure out custom themes and format book reviews.

Overall, I have no regrets and recommend Jekyll as a lightweight alternative to WP.