Pardon my dust – re-homing 21 years of blog content of christianheilmann.com

I’ve been a bit silent here lately. The reason is on the one hand life and issues with that but also problems with the hoster of this blog, specifically the SSL certificate. I’ve spent some fun hours on the phone with helpdesk and it’s still, well, complicated. That’s why I finally took the plunge and will change and move this blog, for the first time.

This blog uses WordPress and it was a great friend over the years. It also was hosted on MediaTemple, who were amazing people to work with and made it simple to buy domains, have them secured and keep the engine up-to-date. Then MediaTemple was bought by GoDaddy and I was forced to buy a new hosting package and out of a sudden getting the SSL for my domain became expensive and a pain in the lower backside. Unneccesarily so, as letsencrypt and others made buying your own certificates and installing them by hand redundant. That doesn’t stop GoDaddy though from charging you for every step on the way. WordPress also has its troubles and I don’t really use its features for anything, so I’m also out.

Lots of other people I admire and blog about the same things that I do kept changing their platform and wrote about that. Every time I considered to do the same, I wrote a post about a current tech topic instead. Now I face the interesting task to change this Frankensteinian something into an easy to maintain and independent product. Here’s what I have:

21 years of blogging with this stack:

• WordPress with a hand-written theme based on best practices I applied in my 2006 work with YUI.
• I did any CSS or template changes live without any backup of the old versions – I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
• I started writing the blog posts in 2005 in HTML
• Roundabout 2007 I changed to Textile as Markdown “felt wrong”
• Along the ride I went through 4 different plugins to display code
• I’ve written a few plugins to include Yahoo search functionality, embed Flickr and Delicious content
• I’ve used many different hand-written solutions to embed videos from YouTube but also many defunct hosting companies
• I’ve also posted code examples on many services that don’t exist anymore
• And I’ve embedded slides from services that also have gone the way of the Dodo.

So, bear with me while I make this all work. So far, I have converted 1850 blog posts to markdown, made sure to keep the original folder structure as not to break any links and started on a leaner, cleaner template to display both the old and the posts to come.

I’m moving off WordPress as I don’t use any of its functionality. I’ve turned off comments years ago as I drowned in spam. I never used the high fidelity editor, but the classic text box. And I don’t use any social media plugins or boosters.

What that leaves me with though is having to implement search and feed generation myself. And I am on a good path.

The next thing I then need to worry about is hosting, as I really want to say goodbye to GoDaddy. I currently work to convert the blog to Jekyll and will find a place for it. Any recommendations are welcome and I want to maintain it in the future on Git(Hub) as I am writing it in VS Code anyway.

Without further ado, here are the steps I took/I am taking:

• Take a snapshot of the blog using Simply Static ✅
• Ensure that no links break – this is 21 years of SEO juice after all
• Write a script to create index pages for years and months
• Write a script to convert the mess that is the generated content to markdown, stripping all code highlighting and weird iframe shenanigans
• Create a search that will work in static page environments
• Maintain the feed – somehow
• Create summaries for each post using AI
• Create a grand new theme to display the old and make it nicer to read the new for agents and people

Join me in Part 2, coming soon.