I finally got around to moving my entire website, including the blog, to Pelican. I probably would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling kids who hacked my friend’s server and convinced me that it’s worth the effort to go static.
It only took 5 hours! I am more and more convinced that static websites allow for a better streamlined workflow that does wonders for productivity.
The static part of my old website was made with Jekyll before, so I kept it almost identical, except for fixing some childish CSS bugs. The same self-hate that comes with reading code that you wrote yourself years ago also comes from markup, apparently.
The blog, however, was migrated thanks to Pelican’s Wordpress importer. This means that the images are missing, the comments are missing (though I think they can be imported somehow) and the plugin-specific syntax such as Latex and source code is poorly rendered. Luckily the images are there in the database dump, but I will need to go through the posts one by one to fix everything. For now, my priority was to get it up and running and keep as many of the old links as possible.
Unfortunately GitHub Pages doesn’t allow URL
rewriting, but I use CloudFlare for DNS and their
free plan gives me the right to use three forwarding rules. With just 3 rules
I couldn’t save all of the old URLs, so I had to prioritize something. I
decided to rescue the links pointing directly to articles, which needed two
rules, for links with and without trailing slashes, because the CloudFlare
syntax has no way of specifying optional characters. I used the third wish
that the genie granted me to simply redirect the subdomain
blog.vene.ro to the appropriate subfolder,
vene.ro/blog.
Best part about this is that I will now be able to migrate my personal list of papers to pelican-bibtex.
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