I eventually got sick of wordpress and of my former hoster free.fr. Wordpress is probably awesome if you are a team of 15 authors who want to handle mass production of articles with a nice web interface. On the other hand, it needs constant updates, and the last ones where requiring a version of php that my hoster did not provide.

Looking for an alternative, I found the argument of nicdumz about blogofile pretty much convincing: why use php and databases where flat html files could be just enough? I have thus decided to go for a static website generator, and while I am at it, to host my blog on amazon s3. This brings me the confort of writing my articles on vim, to version them on git and to manage the whole process from a makefile.

Moving

If anyone who reads me plans to make such a move (wordpress to pelican), I'll summarize the steps I went through.

Extracting your articles

Being open and in the spirit of every good free software, wordpress lets you export your blog using an xml format. Pelican can take advantage of this xml file to generate rst files using pandoc. Or if you are lazy, you can just provide an rss feed to the pelican importer, but you'll still miss a way to get the comments.

Extracting your comments

Pelican does not provide a comment system by itself, but integrates nicely with disqus. Just make an account and upload the Wordpress xml export file I mentioned. Disqus provides a way to import comments from such a file. You will later be able to reattach threads to their articles by providing a csv map file following the syntax:

old_url, new_url

Setting up an amazon account

The next step is to set up an amazon account for use with s3, and to buy a domain name if you don't already own one. I bought the latter using gandi.net, and I used vaporfile to set up an amazon bucket. I don't see much to add here, given the fact vaporfile provides a friendly wizard that tells you what to do quite accurately.

What I could not fix

The blog entries on my previous blog were obtained through links looking like

"http://chm.duquesne.free.fr/blog/?p=xxx"

Whereas on the new version, they look like

"http://blog.chmd.fr/title-of-the-article.html"

It would have been cool to be able to put 301 redirect entries in a .htaccess, for the sake of SEO-friendliness. However, this would require some url rewriting, which free does not support. I decided to skip this step. I am keeping a map between the former and the new urls, just in case I'd have the courage to write these redirections in php...