Yesterday I described why I moved from Github Pages to Micro.blog so today I wanted to cover how I moved. Moving my domain and static pages was trivial but migrating the content has proved harder than I thought it would be!
As I mentioned yesterday, my previous site was hosted by GitHub Pages which has a very similar architecture to Micro.blog.
The first thing I did was update my DNS entries (hosted by Cloudflare on the free plan) as per the succinct and clear instructions on the Micro.blog help site. In my case I set up both the A record and the CNAME record (and had to delete one of my existing A records as GitHub Pages requires two).
With that done I set my Domain name in Micro.blog as www.matt17r.com, with the www so Micro.blog would work with both matt17r.com and www.matt17r.com.
The last thing I did for this part of the migration was move my about page (I only have one static page). Within Micro.blog I first had to delete the standard about page (which takes content from the “About Me” box on your profile page) and create a new page called “About”. I then copied the Markdown content from matt17r/about.md in my git repository (less the YAML Front Matter) into the new page.
This bit was surprisingly tricky! I already have my posts in Jekyll format so I thought there’d be a simple Jekyll (or at least Markdown) importer. I searched around and even asked on the Indie Microblogging Slack and found out there’s nothing publicly available.
I moved one article my pasting the content into MarsEdit and editing the date before posting it… but even that proved difficult as I made a mistake with the date and there was no way to edit the (automatically generated) URL after I posted it. In the end I had to delete it and repost it more carefully.
I’m currently experimenting on writing a Jekyll plugin with a post_render Hook that could maybe write every post to M.b using the Micropub API. If I’m successful I’ll post more here. In the meantime my old posts are all 404ing.