See What Sticks

So now that I've changed my blogging platform, I have something to blog about: my new blogging platform!

From the WordPress eXtended RSS file of the contents of my blog I found I had exported 3273 posts. Jekyll re-renders every post every time a change is made... on the default template it takes 3 minutes, but on the Lanyon template it ran over 20 minutes before I cancelled the build. That's why I started with only a few dozen posts.

I then changed my archive strategy, using yearly and monthly archives similar to what I had used with WordPress instead of the pagination used in Lanyon, and lo and behold the build took only 2.5 minutes. The disadvantage is that GitHub won't run the jekyll-archives plugin for me, so I have to render the site locally and push the rendered HTML to GitHub. I can live with that.

The next question was whether Google (and everyone else) could find the old links on the new site. Jekyll is able to use the same archives/:year/:month/:day/:title/ permalink stucture I was using before. But were all my links the same as before? Do they all still work? Well, that eXtended RSS file contains all the permalinks that WordPress had generated...

 <link>http://papasc.home/archives/1999/12/05/it-worked/</link>
 <link>http://papasc.home/archives/1999/12/06/week-37/</link>
 <link>http://papasc.home/archives/1999/12/07/ready-and-waiting/</link>
 <link>http://papasc.home/archives/1999/12/09/linux-fever/</link>
 ...

(Yes, that's a fake URL. My hoster timed out producing the eXtended RSS file so I had to use a local install.) I then ran the links through a shell script I found on Stack Exchange:

 #!/bin/bash
 while read -ru 4 LINE; do
     read -r REP < <(exec curl -IsS "$LINE" 2>&1)
     echo "$LINE: $REP"
 done 4< "$1"

And, indeed, all the links work. Whether the content still makes sense is another question, but PapaScott is back online in its entirety!