WordPress to Static Blog: Flipping the Switch

Posted on June 6, 2022 by Aywren

Last week I announced my intentions to migrate my blog off of WordPress to my own hand-coded static HTML website. As of last night, I flipped the switch and my domain Aywren.com is now pointing at the new host.

This is the first post I’ve authored in the new style. Basically, I’m just typing it up in MS Word, converting it to HTML, and pasting it in a template that I’ve created for blog posts. It takes just a slight bit more work to get it done, but nothing painful.

I have lots of topics for my blog stewing in my head, but I was holding off on writing any of them until I moved to the new site and redirected my domain. So I decided to make push forward with getting my blog to a point where I could do that. And here it is.

Things to Know

My entire blog has not been updated to the new format yet, and a good chunk of it is not available for viewing. This is an ongoing project. But as of today, I have the last six months of content up, and I have template the pages I know to be the most often viewed based on WP stats.

There were things that I needed to test out that I couldn’t test until I rerouted my domain. So I decided that was the minimal shippable product to make the transition. The rest of the blog will continue to be updated and brought online as I can work on it.

All of the old links you’ve made to my blog posts will still work. So no broken links from me.

The existing comments have moved over to Disqus. They’re not pretty in that while they maintained the text, avatars didn’t move over with them (this was expected). Future comments in this system will have avatars if you specify them.

My RSS Feed from the old blog will no longer work. I've set up a new RSS feed here that I will manually maintain going forward. If you ever get around to checking feeds on your blogroll, please consider updating mine!

My previous WordPress has been renamed and rebranded. It will function as an announcement blog for posts I put here simply because I have a lot of followers there that I want to keep up to date and WordPress Reader is a handy tool.

I’m currently working on going through the past 6 months of content on the old WordPress and changing it up. My goal is to get posts directing to the new site and to delete as much stored media as I can.

Right now, I’m just at 3gigs of media on the old WordPress account. Since I plan to convert this into a free account once my renewal comes up, I want to have this under 3 gigs by that point. Otherwise, they may take it upon themselves to remove some of the media on my old posts, which is something I don’t want to see happen.

One day I will sit down and write about the process  I took to do all this – not that I think people should follow in my footsteps on this. I’m happy I’m taking this route, but it’s not for everyone. You have to have a bit of crazy coding geek in you to decide to migrate 8 years worth of blog to a static site, trust me.

Still, Neocities – where I’m hosting now – has a completely free option without any ads. So, it’s something to consider if you want to dip your toe into old web design and coding!

I’ll keep you updated on the process as I go. There’s still a lot of work to do!

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