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.

I spent a frustrating few hours yesterday and today trying to get things to work properly. I updated to WordPress 3.0 (it went well in a test-environment) and then stuff started to break big time.

I use Textile for markup and suddenly, that caused issues. I tried switching it off, and switching to a lighter version, and I still had trouble editing and displaying posts. Eventually I deleted the WordPress files and installed them again and tried to get everything to work again as I wanted.

Then my RSS-feed broke and Feedburner started to complain.

I think I fixed it...

I really hope I did...

After nearly a month away from my site, it told me to update to Wordpress 2.6. I figured, why the hell not (I like living on the edge). I went through the very easy update-process and thought it all went well. Unfortunately, it didn't. At first I thought everything had broken, all my single pages gave a 404, even the non-blog ones, and all my links to tags and archives stopped working as well! Panic!

Luckily, I found out pretty quickly that I only needed to fill in the 'tags' and 'category' field in the Permalinks section, which solved most of my problems instantly.

The last problem, the archives that didn't work, took pretty long to figure out. I googled trying to find if anyone also had their monthly archive links throw them back to the main page I set the Permalinks to the ugly default, and that didn't work. By now I started to worry and considered rolling back to 2.5.1 just to get the monthly archives links to work again. Before I did, I did an install in a different directory as a test and that one had working monthly archive links. As the new install did not have any but the default plugins, I started disabling plugins in my default installation until I found the culprit: the robots meta plugin. Once I figured that one out, it didn't take long to find a notice of the creator of the plugin, stating that the update revealed a bug and ladida, problem fixed, just update the plugin and set all your settings again. Which I did.

The plugin has a 'disable date archives' option that got checked. In fact, everything got checked. I unchecked unwanted things, saved, and my monthly archive links work as they should again.