---
id: 208
title: 'How I migrated to a static blog'
date: 2016-04-02
author: pesceWanda
layout: post
categories:
 - PesceWanda
tags:
 - static blog
 - jekyll
---


Until one week ago my blog was hosted at my house, on a raspberrypi with debian + wordpress. I was not satisfied by my setup because given the minimal size of my blog and the really scarce content I post every now and then, a full LLMP stack was overblown.
I decided to change distribution (my server now runs [Void](http://www.voidlinux.eu/)) and to migrate to a static blog without CMS nor PHP.

# Welcome to Jekyll and Hyde
The process of migration was rather painless.
First of all I installed ruby on my desktop computer, then via ruby gems I installed jekyll:

`gem install jekyll`

`gem install jekyll-gist`

`gem install jekyll-paginate`

I used a [wordpress plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/jekyll-exporter/) to copy all my old posts.
Then I cloned from [git](https://github.com/poole/hyde) the Hyde theme which you can see a demo [here](http://hyde.getpoole.com/) and corrected a pair of warning that jekyll printed on my terminal. Actually the [jekyll docs](http://jekyllrb.com/docs) are quite complete and covered all the errors that I encountered.

Jekyll structure is quite simple to understand: in the folder \_post/ there are your post in markdown format (remember to delete the examples in that folder);
in the root the are some files that should be modified: the about.md file, the 404 page and index.html that is the frontpage of the blog;
finally \_config.yml contains the general configuration for the website and should be adjusted to your own likings.
When Jekyll builds a website it parses all the markdown files and stores them in \_site folder. Jekyll uses the html files in \_layouts and \_includes to render the markdown files.A

I added a simple [archive page](http://francescomecca.eu/archive/) following the little piece of code in [this page](http://joshualande.com/jekyll-github-pages-poole/)
{% raw %}
	---
	layout: page
	title: Archive
	---

	## Blog Posts

	{% for post in site.posts %}
	  * {{ post.date | date_to_string }} » [ {{ post.title }} ]({{ post.url }})
	{% endfor %}:wq
{% endraw %}
I noticed that in \_includes/head.html there is this line:

```
<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400,300,700,800,600' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'
```

so I proceed to remove it because is not needed for my blog.
Finally I put a link to the archive, my github page and the atom feed on the sidebar by simple adding a href on \_includes/sidebar.html.

I did not proceed with further modifications but there are tons of possibilities with jekyll. I think that the main advantages are the fact that you don't have to manage html code when writing a new post and that everything can be done via cli.

Francesco Mecca