My site goes back to 2004 and is reasonably sized but not massive even with the comments, so waiting 30 seconds for a change to reflect is disappointing.

I investigated several options and ended up using a few in combination, skipping others and holding out for one.

The next stage is considering where to host the site and whether to use a content delivery network (CDN). My preferred approach on other sites has been to:

Adding the CloudFront CDN was essential if you wanted SSL with your domain name, but GitHub pages added support for SSL certs with custom domains

Jekyll does support categories and tags directly but doesn’t support the pagination of categories and tag list pages. The Paginate-v2 gem does solve this — and also lets you tweak the URL format.

My site used the URL formats /blog/category/{category-name}/blog/category/{category-name} and /blog/tag/{tag-name}/blog/tag/{tag-name} with 4 articles per page and a little pager at the bottom offering some indication of what page you are on, and some navigation arrows like this:

Site search is a feature that WordPress got right. Analytics also tells me it is popular. A static site is at a disadvantage, but we have some options to address that.

My first consideration was to use Google Site Search alas it was deprecated last year. There are alternative options, but few are free. I agree that people should be paid for their services, something has to keep the lights on, but a small personal blog with no income stream can’t justify this cost.

I do enjoy discussion and debate, whether designing software or writing articles. Many times the comments have explored the subject further or offered corrections or additional insights and tips. They are vital on my blog, and I was disappointed that Jekyll provides nothing out of the box to handle them.

Third-party solutions like Disqus exist that require you either pay a subscription or have ads inlined with the comments. That $9/month adds up. The alternative of injecting ads onto my blog to support comment infrastructure doesn’t sit right with me.

It’s hard to believe it was 13 years ago, back in a cold December on the little island of Guernsey, when I decided to start blogging. I’d had a static site with a few odd musings since 2000, but this was to be more regularly updated and with technical content. Blogspot seemed the easiest way to get started.

Within 18 months of regular blogging, I’d moved over to Subtext, which, being a .NET app, required Windows hosting, so I threw it on a small Shuttle PC on my home DSL. I started using it as an experiment for CSS and web techniques but, within a year, I’d had my 1MB DSL brought to its knees twice through articles featured on BoingBoing.

For some time I’ve wanted to refresh the design here at damieng.com which evolved out of the Redoable theme with my own tweaks to colors, typography, images and background until it was almost my own.

Almost, but not quite.

It’s been a few weeks since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and whilst the upgrade went well it hasn’t been all plain sailing.

The Manage > FilesManage > Files administration function has been silently removed despite still appearing in the on-line documentation.

The change to WordPress from Subtext went without major hitch. This was great considering I was tweaking the design and articles right up to going on holiday (I wouldn’t do this in a professional environment but my blog is a sandpit for such dare-devil risk taking ;-)

Here are my notes on the experience.

I have been planning on moving my blog off my little Windows Shuttle PC at home onto a hosted service for some time and the latest flurry of activity followed by DSL line meltdown was enough to give me the nudge I needed to get the job done.

Rob Conery provided a useful .NET/Subsonic app to make the transition from Subtext about as painless as possible bar the obvious one of going with a PHP based solution when I know .NET is a better technology.

I’ve been trying to get my content out of Subtext and into WordPress — a process that shouldn’t be difficult however Subtext only supports the blog-independent BlogML format and whilst WordPress supports a number of import formats BlogML isn’t one of them. For export WordPress only supports it’s own WordPress WXR format although the BlogML guys have an exporter available.

The first idea was to put together an XSL transform to convert BlogML to WXR.

Getting my blog out of Blogger.com and into Subtext was not as easy as I’d hoped…

BlogML is an XML format designed to encapsulate a blog, it’s posts, comments and categories. Sounds great for transferring between blogs… Alas while SubText and many other engines support it Blogger.com does not.