Date

I have finally migrated this blog from WordPress on a Site5 shared hosting plan in US central, to a Pelican static site on my Linode instance in Singapore. I've wanted to do it ever since I found out about static site generators. However, I've been putting it off for a few years now. I had neither enough time nor enough motivation to follow through. As you can see, my last post was made more than 4 years go.

Why?

One might ask why I wanted to migrate my blog. There are several contributing reasons, none of which would have been, by itself, sufficient to make me move:

  • I had an under-utilised Linode instance, which I needed for other purposes anyway; So migrating and shutting down my Site5 account would be cheaper in the long run.
  • I couldn't use SSL/TLS with the Site5 hosting plan, which means my admin sessions with the WordPress installation could be MITM'ed and my password could be stolen, however slim the chances were;
  • The old blog was running WordPress, which means PHP, which means a constant security hazard, even if I kept the WordPress and plug-in versions up-to-date (manually);
  • Serving up static pages is just faster than dynamic pages rendered in PHP. I know that because I already had another static website running on Linode.
  • I wanted to quit using Facebook and start blogging again. Facebook was toxic to me. Reading posts about my "friends" having fun made me feel more aware that I'm not having fun in life, and made me feel more miserable and more depressed. At the same time, I cannot talk about my depression on Facebook because I I also don't want to be the product.

How?

Generally I just followed these guides by Jason Antman:

In addition, I decided to customize and upgrade the pelican-bootstrap3 theme myself, with the following improvements:

  • Support for subcategories;
  • Support for explicit Disqus thread identifiers (so I can migrate comment threads more smoothly);
  • Use more icons from Font Awesome 5;
  • Upgrade to Shariff 3.2.0 for social network sharing;
  • Customize what post metadata to display in the post list.

I also had to change the URLs of my posts in the Disqus dashboard because Pelican cannot generate my blog with the exact same URL structure as WordPress.

I'm not going to go into more details. Plenty of other tutorials exist to teach you how to migrate from WordPress to Pelican.

Now what?

I have decided to keep all of my old posts from WordPress, even those that will paint me in an unfavourable picture. I was young, I was naïve, but that's how I was. To some degree, that's still how I am today. I don't think there is any point in pretending to be someone I'm not. If you're going to be my friend or if you're going to work with me, you'll need to know what kind of person I am, even if I may not tell you in your face.

You may also notice that my blog name is now "Scriptūrae Insanī", which literally means "Writings of a Mad Man" in Latin. That's because I cannot promise producing anything coherent on this site. I'll start writing new posts at irregular intervals. There will be rants, ventings about my depression, and hopefully some technical posts. It's been too long since I wrote anything long-form. Due to all the shit that's happening in life, I have trouble concentrating and writing. Even this very post took me more than two days to write. And I really need to go to bed now.

Ad nos revisendōs!



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