Moved blog to static website generator

Ralf Schlatterbeck

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I've finally moved my blog to a static site generator. The criteria for selection were:

  • Support for ReStructuredText as the markup language

  • A responsive design

And since I had Wordpress (WP) previously one of the benefits of the chose software, the static website generator Nikola, which I'm using now, was that it can import WP from the WP XML backup format (in the latest 1.2 version).

The WP importer can convert to HTML or MD (Markdown), I found the latter to produce too many artefacts and chose to use the HTML format. I had to change the size of a picture and fix the caption of some pictures with a caption in WP (seems the converter did not recognize this). Otherwise the conversion was fine.

Converting the comments, however, was more work: The converter produces .wpcomment files, one for each comment. They need the static_comments plugin for Nikola.

The generated files need the specification of the compiler (which produces static HTML for the comment) inside the comment-file. So I had to fix this line in all of them. I chose to use ReStructuredText, the directive is:

.. compiler: rest

which, of course, needs editing of the comments where they use HTML entities.

In addition the static_comments plugin needs setup of some localization strings that are used in the template. It mentions that these have to be added but fails to mention how and where. I've opened a github issue for this.

In my old WP blog, WP marks links in blog comments, both the URL of the commenter as well as links in the comment text as rel=external nofollow. I wanted to retain this for the comments and have changed the jinja template that comes with static_comments as indicated in a second github issue. This works when a blog-comment author has specified an author-URL. So far I have found no way of specifying that a rendered link generated by ReStructuredText should contain a rel=nofollow. So currently all the comments that contained a link inside the comment text will have search machines follow those links (I've verified this would cause no harm in my case). For people converting from WP with more posts than my blog, conversion of comments will be an issue that potentially will cause a lot of work.

I hope to be able to blog more now that the awkward markup language of WP will no longer be an excuse :-)