Migrated Blog


With my Coronavirus-related CFT I finally got around to migrating off Blogger. I lost comments, but I think I’ll probably keep it like that: there’s twitter, and Blogger’s anti-spam facilities were pretty much hopeless.

My first attempt used jekyll. I suppose this works best with Github Pages, because I gave up on it pretty quickly: various irritating Ruby version incompatibilities, random tracebacks from modules, import not working well at all etc.

Next stop was hugo which was much, much nicer. Although it was still a little tedious to import (there’s not really integration, so you need 3rd party tools like the one I used to import the Blogger content - blog2md).

The base theme I ended up using was Strange Case. Having battled with impenetrable Wordpress themes in the past, it was refreshing to be able to modify something so eminently hackable, and being based on the familiar bootstrap was a big plus as well.

It took me a while to fix up a few things (like making Recent Posts show only posts, instead of all pages), and getting used to the way hugo searches the layout files took a bit of time, but it was all in all a good experience.

It seemed a little tricky to create all the necessary 301 Redirect directives for the old Blogger-style permalinks, so I crapped out and just manually added a few that I know people might actually want to find via Google.

I spent far too long trying to find an Atom feed importer for my old Sun blog. Seems like there isn’t a general one, so I threw roller2hugo together instead, which works just enough.