I might migrate this blog after all
The internet was too laggy last night to do any sort of gaming, so for some reason, out of morbid curiousity, I set about trying to work out how to import a blogger blog to Jekyll. It worked, but I just did it in a test directory, which left me without a _config.yml file and Jekyll build exploded after finding some older files that either Blogger or Wordpress before it had helpfully changed various commonly used characters to their UTF-8 equivalent.
I went through and modified a few files by hand, returning them to ASCII, but honestly it was a giant pain in the ass. Finally I decided to give this a shot in my _config.yml:
name: fwaggle.org
markdown: redcarpet
pygments: true
encoding: UTF-8
permalink: /:year/:month/:day/:title.html
… and it built! The permalink setting is required to stop Jekyll from building all sorts of obscene directories and duplicating my content into all of them - I don’t really know who would want a site like that, why it defaults that way, and what is gained in terms of SEO or whatever by having the categories in the URL. But regardless, it’s trivial to stop it.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, Blogger is terribly convenient: when I want to use a photo I’ve taken on my phone, they’re already right there (since my Android phone backs everything up to Google Drive/Picasa/whatever). On the other hand there’s a lot of things about Blogger I really don’t like which I’ve complained about before.
I’ll ponder it some more but keep the work I’ve done.
