I’ve been trying to revive my blog for a while, I was going to use GH pages with Jekyll because Wordpress is such a burden to maintain.
When I started writing my blog I was paying $25 per month to host my blog on a VPS, I had little use for the VPS so most of the time it was just there doing nothing but serving my blog with wordpress, from time to time I had to log into the server update all the packages, and upgrade the wordpress instance. Last time I logged into the server I saw that I haven’t logged in 11 months or so, I was very busy at that time and didnt want to have that server hacked because lack of maintenance, that plus $300 a year in server costs didnt help to make a case on keeping the server.
I knew there was multiple blog platforms but because I want to be in control of my content that discarded every platform, so my only option was a static site, but that didnt happen for another 4 years, I did some previous attempts with Jekyll and Lektor but it was just to much work migrating the content every time I’ve spent an hour or 2 just to be frustrated so I never did the move.
This month I had some spare time, and I’ve decided to do the migration, I was familiar with hugo so I gave it a try, and in less than 2 minutes I had a working site, so I’ve looked in my backups and found my old wp files, along with the db, I thought it would be easy to just get the content from the db dump, but it was not going to work because it had a lot of html embedded and the images were doing references to absolute urls.
So my other option was to try to make the old instance work, I have an Ubuntu 14 VM for legacy projects, so I did quick vhost setup, restored the db put the files, and fixed the config and wordpress worked!
I was planning to use this hugo exporter plugin but the admin dashboard was broken with the following error in the logs:
[Wed Apr 03 20:36:27.151639 2019] [:error] [pid 19662] [client 192.168.8.198:41112] PHP Fatal error: Access to undeclared static property: WP_Screen::$this in /var/www/blogwp.fiv/wp-admin/includes/screen.php on line 706, referer: http://ivanvillareal.com/wp-admin/options-privacy.php
So I edited that part and changed the $this to self and the dashboard worked, I disabled the plugins, and I was able to update the wp instance from the dashboard, I had version 3.4 and it updated to 5.1 without any other issue I have to admit that I was impressed by such feat.
I’ve performed the plugin installation and then exported everything, it did a decent job I had to do some edits to remove the cache stuff, and change the format of the code blocks, but all went ok.
I’ve spent some time on the design and Today I just finished moving all the content. I think all I’ve written is not useful anymore, but reading my old posts brings back memories from a different time, and that has value to me.
Since I stopped writing in this blog I’ve worked with many different technologies, but as today my work is mostly Python on backend services, so I’m going to write about that.