Erik L. Arneson is a freelance writer and software developer with WordPress experience. He is located in Portland, Oregon. Jekyll 2026-06-18T15:03:10+00:00 https://arnesonium.com/feeds/jekyll.xml Erik L. Arneson Erik L. Arneson 2022-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 https://arnesonium.com/2022/09/migrating-from-wordpress-to-jekyll <p>Since launching this site in 2014, it has run on WordPress. I have always wanted to move the site to another blogging platform, especially since I wasn’t really taking advantage of all of the WordPress features. <!--more--></p> <ul> <li><strong>I kept running WordPress for years for two reasons.</strong></li> </ul> <p>First, I needed to show off my WordPress skills to attract clients. Second, I thought it would be difficult to migrate away from WordPress. Once I got some experience with <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a> and <a href="https://pages.github.com/">GitHub Pages</a>, I knew I wanted to eventually move to that platform.</p> <ul> <li><strong>I followed <a href="https://talk.hyvor.com/blog/migrate-from-wordpress-to-jekyll/">these simple instructions</a></strong> by <a href="https://talk.hyvor.com/blog/author/supun/">Supun Kavinda</a> and used a plugin to export all of my content from WordPress to Jekyll.</li> </ul> <p>The process <strong>only took about an hour</strong> to get everything set up.</p> <p>I then spent hours tweaking everything until it looked good. Probably too many hours.</p> <h2 id="why-migrate-to-jekyll">Why migrate to Jekyll?</h2> <p>Jekyll is a static site generator, and pages and posts are all generated with easy Markdown. This makes it easy to keep the layout simple and easy to do things like share source code.</p> <ul> <li><strong>Here is some simple Go code</strong> just to show you how it looks.</li> </ul> <div class="language-go highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="k">func</span> <span class="n">main</span><span class="p">()</span> <span class="p">{</span> <span class="n">fmt</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">Println</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s">"Welcome to the playground!"</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="n">fmt</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">Println</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s">"The time is"</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">time</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">Now</span><span class="p">())</span> <span class="p">}</span> </code></pre></div></div> <p><strong>GitHub Pages makes it easy to use source control</strong> to track changes to your website. I have been loving this function on other websites I maintain. As an added bonus, I was tired of the WordPress theme I had been using, and didn’t relish the thought of finding a new one.</p> <h2 id="what-about-missing-features">What about missing features?</h2> <p>Indeed, I will need to figure out how to handle all of the little broken things in all of my old posts going back to 2014. Here are some features I will miss:</p> <ul> <li>Automatically embedded Tweets.</li> <li>Automatic sharing of new posts to Twitter and LinkedIn.</li> <li>Password-protected web pages.</li> </ul> <p>Also, my Disqus account doesn’t seem to be loading correctly. Will I fix that? Who knows! In the meantime, if you want to respond to this, you can <a href="https://twitter.com/pymander">find me on Twitter</a>.</p>