
Just moved this blog from Wordpress to Jekyll.

Previously, I was using a shared hosting server to run this blog on a Wordpress + MySQL combo. That worked well and it stood solid for the kind of traffic that I usually get (~30K pageviews/month).

But being a web developer, I always wanted to run my own web server and host my blog there. Hence the move.

Now what you read is proudly served from a [Linode](http://linode.com) machine by a [Nginx](http://nginx.org/) server with the static HTML pages generated by [Jekyll](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll) and version controlled at [Github](https://github.com/vraa/blog). Neat, huh!?

The move was not easy though. I had around 300 posts in my wordpress. Some of the posts are not so much useful or became obsolete now. So, I had to to nitpick which one to move to the new platform. Google Analytics helped a bit to decide on the top performers. I kept my own favorites untouched. Rest of the posts were axed.

Also, the Wordpress to Jekyll converter plug-in did a good job of reformatting my blog posts to suit the Jekyll structure. But it messed up with some of the posts and I had to manually skim thorugh the content to fix things up. So, if you see any formatting issues, please let me know about it and I'll fix.

As part of passing the knowledge torch, here's the list of steps that I did to switch the blogging platform.

## How you can move from Wordpress to Jekyll?

First of all, if you new to Jekyll and you are confused with the offical definition '_Simple, blog aware, static site generator_', here's my version of explaining Jekyll to you (either to confuse you more or give you a clear idea).

> Jekyll is a program written in Ruby. Unlike Wordpress, you run Jekyll in your local machine, not on your web server. Unlike Wordpress, Jekyll does not give you admin panel or anything. Unlike Wordpress, you do not need a MySQL database to store your post content. Unlike Wordpress, you can't simply upload images and expect them to be available for your posts. You need to host images in somewhere else (or your own server) and you need a URL to include it in your posts.

All Jekyll does is that it converts your posts, mixes them with template files and finally generate a static, plain, old HTML files which you can host at any web servers.

Jekyll is not for weak-hearted.

If you are familiar with JavaScript templates such as _Mustache_, _Dust_ in which you define templates with placeholder for data and you pass JSON to prepare the final content, Jekyll is exactly that - you define your page structure (templates) with placeholders for content and you write your posts. When you run Jekyll, it will insert your posts in the placeholders and spit out complete HTML files.

So, here's what you should do if you want to switch.

### Phase 1: Install Jekyll in your local machine.

1. Install Ruby.
2. Install Jekyll.
3. If not already done, Install Git.
4. Clone any existing Jekyll sites, so that you don't need to create _everything from scratch_. [Tom Preston-Werner](https://github.com/mojombo/mojombo.github.com) is a good starting. Here's [mine](https://github.com/vraa/blog), forked from Tom Preston's and modified to suit my blog.
5. Get familiar with the Jekyll folder structure.

### Phase 2: Convert Wordpress posts to Jekyll posts.

1. Take backup of your current wordpress blog (very, very important).
2. Install this plugin - [Wordpress to Jekyll exporter](https://github.com/benbalter/wordpress-to-jekyll-exporter/archive/master.zip) - _zip_ file.
3. In Wordpress admin panel, go to Export and export your posts to Jekyll. The plugin will create a zip file which will be downloaded.

### Phase 3: Create your blog in Jekyll

1. Copy the converted wordpress posts (which are in Markdown format) to Jekyll's `_posts` folder.
2. Familiarize yourself with [Markdown syntax](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax).
3. Make sure the content of your posts are properly formatted in Markdown. If you had code block in HTML, XML then you'll definitely have problems. Review those posts once again and copy the correct content from your backup.
4. If you are using Windows and your posts are in UTF-8 encoding, make sure the files do not have _BOM_ character in its header. If BOM is there, then Jekyll conversion will not work as expected. You can use [UTFCast](http://www.rotatingscrew.com/utfcast.aspx) to convert your files to UTF-8 format with out BOM (make sure you uncheck _write BOM_ while converting).
5. Go wild and design your blog as per your taste. Run Jekyll in auto refresh mode to see the changes you make immediately reflected in browser: `jekyll --auto --server`.
6. Once done, the final blog will be available in `_site` folder. Take the content and host them anywhere you want.

### Phase 4: Version Controlling & Auto publishing.

So far, if you make any changes to your blog, you have to manually FTP the changes to your hosting server. But there are [nice tricks](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Deployment) available that helps to automate this step. Use them and create awesomeness.


Moving from Wordpress to Jekyll


As part of this blog's re-design, I wanted to show the number of posts and comments as a widget in the sidebar. But I couldn't find a plugin that does exactly what I wanted. So, I wrote one on my own.

Below is the source code for this wordpress plug-in which you can drop it in your *plugins *folder and then activate it as usual. Then, in your *Widgets* section, you'll see a new widget that you can use it in your sidebar.

## Source for WordPress StatsBoard plugin to display the posts and comments count:

[gist id='1976268']

You can use the plugin however the way you want, of course, at your own risk! ![:)][1]

[1]: https://veerasundar.com/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif


WordPress plugin to show the posts and comments count in the sidebar


Custom fields are the user defined information that are assigned to any blog post in WordPress. They are also called as **meta-data**. Blog authors usually define the custom fields when they write the blog post to give some extra information like mood, whether,etc. Custom fields are **key/value** pairs, that means you can define any key and assign any value to this key. To know more about custom fields check out [WordPress.org][1] site. With this explanation, it is easy to control the ad presence in your blog post easily with custom fields.

[1]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Custom_Fields

### Control ad presence in blog post with custom fields

As a blog author, you may want to include ad in some of your blog posts and may not want to have ads in other blogs. But it will be tedious to make a code change every time you post a blog. So we are going to define a custom field `$show_ad` and in the blog template we will check for this custom field. And, if it is YES we will include the advertisement and if it is NO or NULL we are not going to insert the advertisement.

### Code changes to check for a custom field

1.  Open the _single.php_ wordpress template file
2.  Search for the text `the_content` and after this line, insert the below code. This will put the advertisement in the bottom of every post. If you want to place your ad on top of every post, copy below code above to the `the_content` line.
3.  _Code to be inserted_

4.  Save the changes.
5.  After this, when ever you want to insert ad in your blog post, just define a custom field `show_ad` and give it a value 'YES'. Your ad code will be inserted to this post alone. If you don't want to insert ad, just don't define any custom fields. So simple, isn't it?


#wordpress (3)