From WordPress to nanoc
After being tired of updating WordPress more often than writing blog posts, having to deal with increasing comment spam and the desire to blog like a hacker I now switched my whole website to the static website generator nanoc, ending the era of WordPress blogging after many years. Now I’m able to write my posts in my favorite text editor, use Git for versioning and do deployments easily via rsync.
I removed blog post categories entirely and tags are only listed at the end of journal posts, but there’s no functionality behind them yet (which may change sooner or later). The comment functionality was replaced with Disqus, old comments will appear when the import is done (in a few hours).
I recycled the old layout (with a few improved details) and migrated all my posts with wp2nanoc, which was pretty easy. Let me know if you find any errors.
I introduced a few new things: finally I integrated a lightbox for more convenient image viewing – and I found the great Magnific Popup which is CSS3-only and responsive. Since I wasn’t able to use my old WordPress syntax highlighting plugin, I switched to a JavaScript highlighter called Rainbow which is doing a great job so far.
Why nanoc? A few months ago I started to think about switching to Octopress or plain Jekyll or building a Sinatra-based site by myself. But then I attended FOSDEM 2013 and the talk of Denis Defreyne on his static site generator nanoc. nanoc looked so easy yet powerful and flexible, so I started to play around and rebuild my site with it. It turned out nanoc is really a great piece of software.
The basic version is now ready, but there are many open tasks. I didn’t yet integrate Sass/Compass, didn’t clean up my templates and CSS enough and my layout is still not responsive and mobile-ready.
While I still plan to write a more technical post and release the code of this website, if you want to check out nanoc I can recommend some related blog posts which were useful to me:
I'm a software developer living and working in Mannheim, Germany.