Change of plan: I'm moving this site not from WordPress to Rails, but from WordPress to Jekyll.

It was kind of fun developing a blog from scratch in Rails, but it's taking too long to get it finished, and I'd rather use the time for other things. Jekyll is a static blogging system built in Ruby. It's simple, powerful, and free to host via GitHub Pages.

Here are the very simple steps I've taken to migrate:

  1. Create a new repository on GitHub
  2. Create a new Jekyll site and push it to the GitHub repository
  3. Import data from WordPress (using this fix for paragraph/line breaks, then cd jekyll-import / rake build / gem install pkg/jekyll-import-0.1.0.gem)
  4. Fetch the uploads (images), change the URLs for the images, move the pages to page-name/index.html, set up permalinks and pages
  5. Add LaTeX (a couple of lines of javascript)
  6. Add a feed (call it feed/index.html, which is a bit messy but seems to work) [Update: feed/index.xml works on GitHub pages]
  7. Add Bootstrap to make the page look reasonable (use Bootstrap CDN, dead easy)
  8. Pagination
  9. Post excerpts (based on this)
  10. Use Disqus for comments
  11. And a few other odds and ends

The site isn't quite live, but you can look at the repository on GitHub.

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