Blog Move
For awhile now I’ve been thinking of moving my blog hosting to a different platform. At time of writing, it’s running on WordPress in Azure on a small app service plan. It’s been fine, but there are things to improve.
Architecture overkill
Having a WordPress app running off a MySQL database is just overkill for my blog site. That combination has worked fine for me, and continues to work fine for millions. WordPress offers some conveniences like tags, themes, and tons of plugins, but nothing I couldn’t replicate with a static site generator. And I have WordPress comments disabled because they have been 99.99% spam. I could always host Discus comments on the static generated site if I really wanted to.
Selecting a New Platform
My requirements for the new blogging platform:
- Custom domain name support
- HTTPS support
- Pretty URLs
- Simple commit/push static site generation/publish
- RSS feed generation
- Modern lightweight HTML and CSS
- Markdown support
- Site_map.xml and other SEO optimizations
After looking at different options I have settled on GitHub Pages. The following is a checklist I’m using to manage the process.
- Create site repo
Create folder structure to match the year/mm structure of blog history- Move static assets to assets folder
- Move blog posts over, fixing broken content per page
- Move over non-blog post pages (About, presentations, etc.)
- Syntax highlighting for code samples
- Set up RSS feed
- Set up sitemap.xml
- Pick theme
- Add social links (GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, RSS)
- Add Google Analytics Id
- Point DNS to new host
- Turn off/delete old site
