Finished the Wordpress-to-Jekyll Migration

In my last post, I talked about the process of migrating my Wordpress.com blog into this Jekyll blog. I finally finished this process — at least, to the extent where nothing is left but touch-ups — so in this post, I’d like to explain the final migration steps.

The Manual Stuff

Let’s start with the stuff that I put off as long as possible: checking every single post to fix every single blog-to-blog post link and every single image. With 150 posts, this was not the most fun activity in the world.

Due to the transition to Jekyll, the old blog-to-blog links¹ that I had in my blog posts were no longer valid. To fix those up, I went through every single blog post, checked if it referenced any other blog posts as links, and changed the link by replacing seitad.wordpress.com with danieltakeshi.github.io. Remember, this is only valid because I changed the Wordpress.org way of permalinks to match Jekyll’s style. If I had not done that, then this process would have involved more editing of the links.

I also fixed the images for each post. For each post that uses images, I had to copy the corresponding file location in my old folder that contained my Wordpress.com images, and paste them into the assets folder here. Then, I fixed the image HTML in the Markdown file so that they looked like this:

<img src="https://danieltakeshi.github.io/assets/image_name" alt="some_alt_text">

By keeping all images in the same directory, they have a common “skeleton” which makes life easier, and image_name is the file name, including any .png, .jpg, etc. stuff. The some_alt_text is in case the image does not load, so an alternative text will appear in place of the image.

The Interesting Stuff

Incorporating LaTeX into my posts turned out to be easier than expected. Unlike in Wordpress, where I had to do a clumsy $latex ... $ to get math, in Jekyll + MathJax (which is the tool to get LaTeX to appear in browsers) I can do $$ ... $$. For example: $$\int_0^1 x^2dx$$ results in \(\int_0^1 x^2dx\). It does require two extra dollar signs than usual, but nothing is perfect.

Note: to get MathJax, I pasted the following code at the end of my index.html file:

<script type="text/javascript" 
  src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML">
</script>

There were a few other things I wanted to do after incorporating math, and they also required modifying index.html:

• To have all the post content appear on the front page rather than only the titles. The latter case forces the user to click on the title to see any of the content.
• To add pages on the home page so that the first page (the default one) would display the 20 most recent posts, then the next page would list the next 20, etc.

To get the post content to appear, in index.html where it loops through the posts in the site, there is a place where one can post the content by using the post.content variable². To get the pages, see this blog post which explains that one needs to add the paginage: X line in the _config.yml file, where X is clearly the amount of posts per page. Then, one can loop through the paginator.posts variable to loop through the posts. To get a page counter at the bottom that lets you jump from page to page, you need to use the paginator.previous_page, paginator.page, and paginator.next_page variables. Again, see the linked blog post, which explains it clearly.

The Future

There are certainly a bevy of things I could do to further customize this blog. I’ll probably add some Google Analytics stuff later to track my blog statistics, but I don’t view that as a high priority. Instead, I would like to start writing about more computer science topics.