TannieSpace

geekery, drawing and then some

Posts about site

Oh yeah, btw...

I got a little tired from the issues I had with WordPress . Not because WordPress doesn’t do what it says it does — it does actually — but because I don’t write that much here anymore and I felt that I only consistently kept the site up-to-date WordPress-wise, and not content-wise. I felt I spent more time on updating than on anything else.

Which — naturally — meant I started fiddling. First, I tried Pelican which I liked and really wanted to use. Then, I stumbled on Nikola

I tried them both and they both seemed to work for me. In the end, I went for Nikola. It seems faster and better at not rebuilding posts unnecessarily.

The migration required the following steps:

  1. Export an xml-file of my WordPress-data (posts and pages).

    Easy enough through the ‘Tools > Export > All Content’ in the WordPress Admin pane (although I must admit it went horribly wrong for me, but in the end, I managed to get a usable file).

  2. Import in Nikola with nikola import_wordpress file.xml

    This did not work for me, it got stuck or crashed even though I checked the file with xmllint. Instead, I downloaded WordPress to Markdown Exporter and converted the xml-file that way. I lost some info, but nothing very dramatic.

  3. Mess around until everything works and looks okay.

    This took the most time because I got distracted by lots of new stuff like Python and RestructeredText. Had fun.

Pretty sure some things didn’t work as expected and I’ve possibly broken some links. However, I delved into my .htaccess file which should redirect old links to their new place. This mattered even more because at the same time I decided to switch domains 1 from http://tanniespace.com to http://tannie.nl . Apparently, when I decide to mess with things, I mess with them thoroughly.


  1. Yes, I love breaking the internet. 


Mobile site

Mobile site screenshot

I've tweaked and fiddled a bit, and now have a satisfying version of my website for mobile browsers. It all should just work, with a link to the full site on the top right should you prefer that.

I still want to tweak the layout, the pages list only shows up at the home-page, where it maybe should show up everywhere -- navigation matters. Also the search box shows up at the bottom, but maybe I should move it to the top.

I've added the little snowman to the home-page at least, to sync it with the main site's design.

I have also tried to keep it small. It currently loads at a 135kb for the main-page. Looking into making it less KB (the full version consists of 1MB of files, also trying to make it smaller). Just because a lot of us have fancy speedy connections doesn't mean I should aim for that. I aim for the average speed and hope it doesn't take too long to load either page.