Moving old posts from WordPress to Hugo
When you move to Hugo, sooner of later you should migrate every old content to it, so you can get rid of databases and other annoying things
It was almost one year from my switch from WordPress to Hugo and I’m really really satisfied from the result. After some months the only thing that bother me is the fact that I still need to maintain an instance of WordPress just to keep old posts. The only thing that prevented me to migrate was the loss of comments, but actually, after looking to all of my old blog posts, I’ve not such a big amount of comments that worth migrating, the only thing that is important to me is the ability to keep my old post without comments so I can get rid of WordPress. I’m sorry for all of you that spent time commenting on my blog, but migrating the comments would be a huge work.
Also, after some analysis, I’ve realized that I’ve very little comments on my site and Disqus now does not allow to remove ads, so I removed comments entirely, if you want to comment you can directly start a discussion on GitHub repository of my blog, so I can get rid of another not-so-useful part of my blog.
Once I accepted that I can loose old comments, the only thing that remains to do was writing a small tool that can convert all WordPress post to Markdown. The code is bad and ugly, you can find it on this repository on GH. I’ve used a couple of .NET lbraries, the first read all posts from a WordPress Blog reading all the content in HTML, then I have a converter from HTML to Markdown converter. In the middle I have to write some code to handle html and try to remove all bad formatting for code I’ve used in the past. In latest period I’ve used a nice plugin that write code in pre tag then format with JavaScript, but older posts used some weird syntax highlighter that output a real bad HTML with lots of hardcoded style. Markdown converter found very difficult to convert that code, so I pre manipulated HTML to convert bad HTML to Good HTML :).
Finally, once the blog is converted, I can always do some global find and replace to manually fix some other error that can arise after conversion. One Saturday morning was enough to convert everything, you can find all old post clicking on CATEGORIES link.
During conversion I’ve created a series of redirect rule for IIS (actually this blog is hosted on Windows) that allows me to redirect all old url to new url, something like this.
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The problem was that I hit the 250kb limit for web.config, so I included only part of the url, most recent one, issuing a permanent redirect to the new location. Nevertheless I was able to quickly setup a redirect that works as long as I keep everything on a iis machine.
I’m quite satisfied from the result, I got rid of WordPress, Database, Backup, maintenance, upgrade and so on while keeping alive all my old posts with minimal effort.
Gian Maria.