Migrating from DasBlog to Jekyll

If you’re reading this, I’ve successfully migrated bentaylor.org from DasBlog to Jekyll. From a paid Power VPS virtual server, to the free Heroku offering.

Why move off DasBlog?

Mainly for the learning experience. I’m trying to add Ruby, Git and Heroku to my programmers toolbelt. Jekyll is written in Ruby and the sites it generates can be hosted on Heroku using rack-jekyll. Heroku deployments are managed via Git. I get to learn about all these things doing something that is real-world but also simple and unimportant.

WYSIWYG weaning. Jekyll does not have a WYSIWG post editor. This is a good thing. I am trying to learn Vim, so the more time I spend writing code and posts in Vim the better. Plus, I like the simplicity and control you have (I am writing this post in Markdown but you can mix and match HTML etc).

“Static content is web scale”. Somebody wrote that on Twitter the other day and it resonates with me. In my job building e-commerce stores I think a lot about static content. Mainly about how it is underused (the subject for another post). The point is that Jekyll generates a static site for you. At a stroke it eliminates concerns over sketchy code bringing your site down. This is not an issue with DasBlog, it is just something I want to experiment with.

Migrating my DasBlog posts using DasJekyll

Migration. I wrote an app for that. It’s called DasJekyll and it is currently nestling in a private GitHub repository. If you want this application add a comment below. I have not made it public as it has a bunch of hardcoded private stuff in it. If anyone wants it, I’ll clean that out and make the repos public.

It does NOT migrate comments. I did not have enough comments to warrant the effort. Plus, I’ve moved to using DISQUS for comments. I think they can take comment migrations in a spreadsheet, but…

It does move all your posts. DasJekyll creates a single html post for each DasBlog post you made. It also converts the DasBlog metadata (like categories, description etc) to the Jekyll YAML front matter (BTW we need more YAML in .NET land but there does not seem to be a complete parser/serialiser yet).

Supporting extisting post URLs

The DasBlog post URLs all ended with .aspx. Thanks to rack-rewrite, my new post URLs are extensionless and without a terminating directory slash. However, like all good web professionals, I have used rack-rewrite to 301 permanent redirect the .aspx urls to their extensionless equivalents.

I’ll get back to you about Jekyll

This move is an experiment and learning experience. While it seems like a good idea right now, the proof will be in a few months time. Will it encourage more blogging and deliver a better experience for me? We will see.

BTW - I’m not the only person to have migrated from DasBlog to Jekyll. @theprogrammer also made the move and has written Migrating the blog from dasBlog to jekyll.