Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Blogging

speeding up Octopress generation

My site has 966 posts and 70 categories.

By default, Octopress re-generates the entire site - every single post, all the category pages, the archive pages

On my Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom 1.66GHz) netbook, the regeneration takes around 10 minutes.

There are a couple of options that can significantly reduce this time and make the write/preview/edit iterative process more tolerable.

Firstly, you can use ‘rake isolate’ to move all other posts into a ‘stash’ directory and simply process the newly created post.

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migration complete

The last ever migration of this blog is now complete. This blog is now powered by Octopress and is a statically generated site hosted on Amazon S3.

All posts have been migrated from HTML to Markdown and every single permalink (all 954 of them) have been painstakingly checked, rationalised and consolidated.

To achieve this, I simply generated a sitemap of the Drupal site and compared this with a sitemap for a test site using Octopress after the data migration.

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the awkward second post

Octopress is great

  • Uses Google to provide site search
  • Archives builtin
  • Tag support
  • Draft posts
  • Local preview
  • Markdown markup
  • Google+, Disqus, Google Analytics support
  • Incremental deployment
  • Deployment to Amazon S3
  • Fast as lightning

Wish I’d bitten the bullet earlier.

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Hello World

This is my first post in Octopress.

The text uses Markdown which is marvellous.

My favourite blogging platforms are:

  • Octopress
  • Habari
  • Drupal
  • WordPress

The BBC is a popular Web site.

End of message.

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migration plan

Loose thoughts on the plan of attack for the blog migration:

  1. Install Octopress locally
  2. Configure S3 and install a dummy Web site.
  3. Use’s3cmd’ to upload test site to Amazon S3
  4. Test incremental uploads. This is a firm requirement.
  5. Full database backup of existing Drupal blog
  6. Take backup of Drupal installation (additional modules, scripts).
  7. Install vanilla Drupal 7 locally.
  8. Install copy of the existing Dupal blog in local version (overwrite database ?).
  9. Use the Drupal to Octopress migration script. This extracts nodes from the database and creates Markdown files for each post, This script is probably for Drupal 6 so some tweaks (major rewrite) may be needed for bleeding edge Drupal 7. URL aliasing is supposedly supported.
  10. Test the various elements in the checklist. Disqus comments need the correct domain name so will have to come last.
  11. Configure a redirect from ’nbrightside.com’ to the Amazon URL. I can see trouble and lots of Googl’ing here.
  12. Place source code (Markdown posts) into GitHub repository.
  13. Put kettle on.
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blog migration checklist

I am a veteran of blog migrations with the scars to prove it. Here is a handy ‘cut out and keep’ checklist of the important things I normally forget:

  • Permalink structure. Try to preserve the existing permalink structure to save hours of pain. This is particularly important when using Disqus (although there is a URL migration utility for Disqus).
  • Typically, I like to have ‘Archives’, ‘About’ and a ‘Contact’ page.
  • Tag support including a ‘Tags’ page.
  • Images. I have learned to upload all photos and screenshots to PicasaWeb and intentionally de-couple images from the blog platform.
  • Sitemap support. Helps search engines index the site.
  • RSS/Atom support . Previously I have always used Feedburner (although I may follow Google’s example and sever this dependency) and simply use the native feed. Less is more.
  • Comments. Static site generators are slightly limited here (compared with proper blogging platforms) so I guess I will continue to use Disqus. Mind you, for the number of comments versus spam, I may also dispense with comments and invite people to use Google+ or identi.ca.
  • Themes. It would be desirable to be able to change themes to avoid having the same look and feel and every other Octopress blog.

Please feel free to add your own tips in the comments.

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Autumn migration

My Web hosting package (provided by Bluehost) expires in October. As this blog is essentially dead (the last post was a one-liner 8 months ago), the sensible and logical thing to do would be to kill the blog and save £5 a month.

Originally I purchased the domain name ’nbrightside.com’ and the Web hosting for a couple of reasons:

  • I wanted to use self hosted WordPress without some of the restrictions imposed by WordPress.com
  • I wanted to play with some of the packaged applications offered by Bluehost.
  • I wanted access to a Linux environment, mainly to build, install, experiment with various open source software tools and packages which needed a LAMP stack.

It’s really questionable whether I need to maintain this Web presence but, on balance, I’d like to keep the site alive for a little longer.

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blog maintenance

Time to upgrade Drupal again. Yesterday version 7.12 was released and this blog is currently running a very outdated (and probably insecure) 7.4. Although Drupal 7 included automatic update for modules and themes, updating the core Drupal software still needs manual intervention and takes time.

Over the years, the main self-hosted blog platforms I have used are:

  • WordPress - one-click updates. Quick and easy. By far the best and most robust solution. Never let me down.

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Welcome to the brave new world

Well - I lasted about 4 hours without a blog.

This latest incarnation is powered by Hyde.

This means I can write my posts in Markdown, generate and test the site locally and then upload using ‘rsync’.

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