I decided a few months ago that it was time for me to move off of Blogger and find a platform that offered more customizability and control. There’s nothing wrong with Blogger per se, but I was starting to get tired of it’s editor specifically and the fact that I didn’t really have any control of the content once I posted it there.

I found Jekyll through my contributions to Github, and decided it was the platform for me. I’m not a huge fan of either Markdown or Textile, the two markup languages used by Jekyll, but there are far worse tools to have to use when writing a blog post. Being able to write my own markup in my own text editor is a huge improvement over what I was doing.

I’m in the middle of preparing for that migration now. I will be moving off Blogger within the next few days or weeks and will be hosting my blog at Github, at least temporarily. I don’t know where or if I will move it to some place more permanent after that, but Github is a decent home for it now.

Before making the final migration, I have a few requirements that I need to complete first.

  • I need to get a domain name. It’s good to be in control of your own identity like that anyway, and it also comes in handy if I ever need to change hosts again. Obvious choices like “whiteknight.com” are taken or parked. I’m absolutely not interested in anything that’s going to cost me more than 20$.
  • I need to migrate all my blog content, including all comments. I would also like to migrate all post metadata (especially category tags), and update all inter-post links to point to the new locations. This is no small feat, but I am working on a program to do exactly this and will talk about it in a subsequent post
  • I need to set up a new commenting system. I don’t get too many comments on this blog, but the ones I do receive are extremely valuable to me. Since Jekyll is a static site generator, I need to find a separate solution for hosting and managing comments. I have been looking closely at DISQUS, but would be happy to hear about other alternatives too.
  • I need to set up an RSS or ATOM feed. Initially I will probably set up a simple ATOM feed using Jekyll, since I don’t plan on doing too many fancy things like monitoring subscriptions or serving advertisements.

This post is being hosted on my new blog, and will be linked to from my old Blogger site. I won’t be publishing any more posts to Blogger, only links to posts on the new site. When I get my conversion tool complete, I will migrate all content. When I get the atom feed set up, I will probably close my Blogger site down entirely (or lock it and redirect all traffic to the new site). I will post updates about my progress as I go.