Blog Rebuilt

1 minute read

I’ve finished rebuilding this blog again, this time on the Ghost blogging platform. Unfortunately, although Ghost does have migration tools for WordPress and some other CMSes/blogging tools, they don’t have one for Nikola. And anyway my Nikola posts were in a weird mix of imported-from-Wordpress (two files per post, one .meta with metadata and one .wp with HTML) and single file reStructuredText posts.

So I copy & pasted and reformatted and set metadata (post date and tags) on each post from the start of the blog in 2006. Luckily (?) I haven’t been all that prolific here, especially in the past 4 years, so it only took me a couple of days.

Things I noticed / thought about while rebuilding:

  • While the original intention was to replace my mailing list, the content of the blog quickly shifted away from quick reposting of humourous and entertaining links – there were a few posts like that in the beginning, most of them I’ve now deleted as part of this rebuild because the entire post content was a link that no longer worked
  • More recently some of that quick-hit link posting had shifted to Twitter, which I’ve since stopped using again, and some shifted to work chat (Slack)
  • The longer form things that I used to post to my mailing list I’ve still been posting here, very intermittently
  • I wrote much more here in the past than recently, and especially not much in the past 4 years
  • Nikola not having a UI and it proving difficult to get what I wanted into a post was more of a barrier than I expected
  • Of the few things I have been posting, it’s been more technical nugggets for posterity and thoughts about various media consumption than anything actually personal
  • I did a lot of interesting things at work in the past – I’m still doing some interesting things, I should write about them
  • Many of the things I was excited about in the past are no longer interesting, and in some cases I actively dislike
  • I should write more here

I have lots of ideas from reading through my past posts, both in terms of types of things to write about and also just follow-ups or responses to my past self. We’ll see how well I do about keeping going this time. :)