migrating

I’m going to try migrating this site from WordPress to a SvelteKit site hosted on GitHub. I’m paying $99 per year to host on wordpress.com; there’s a cheaper plan now, but I don’t see any way to downgrade - only upgrade. It’s also very limiting: I can’t add an SVG image, custom JS (expected), but even the additional CSS rules are very limited because the theme overrides them.

My hope is to export this site data. Find a way to “load” it into a SvelteKit site, then I’ll go through all the posts by hand and make sure everything is working correctly. I used to host a Jekyll blog site on gh pages, but it kept breaking because GitHub would update dependencies automatically.

One nice thing about WordPress is I can easily write from my phone and schedule posts. I’m actually starting this post on February 17th, but I’ll post it on the 19th.

There are some limitations on GitHub pages. They need to be static which is fine with me, but I’ll likely need to do some tweaking and use a different theme. The storage and bandwidth limitations on GitHub aren’t a concern to me since I don’t get much traffic to my site, and I plan on hosting most videos on YouTube.

Exporting

I went to https://wordpress.com/export/frankiemercado.com to export all my website content. This gave me a big XML file with all my posts. The images are nested inside of month and year folders, so one file may be at ./2022/01/image.jpg.

The formatting of the XML is pretty cluttered; lots of “wp” comments and “wp:…” tags which is to be expected. I think I’d like my site to have each post structured as markdown. When I searched for “wordpress to markdown” I find this script.

From Windows PowerShell, I go to the folder containing all my data.

cd ./Downloads/wp20220218

Then I run the command:

npm wordpress-export-to-markdown

I renamed the XML file to export.xml, and kept the default output folder name. These are the settings I used:

Starting wizard…  
? Path to WordPress export file? export.xml  
? Path to output folder? output  
? Create year folders? No  
? Create month folders? No  
? Create a folder for each post? Yes  
? Prefix post folders/files with date? Yes  
? Save images attached to posts? Yes  
? Save images scraped from post body content? Yes  
? Include custom post types and pages? No

Now I have a folder called output filled with folders for each post named like: YYYY-MM-DD-PostTitle. Inside one of these folders is an index.md file which contains the text and formatting of the post. There is also a folder called images which contains any images from that post.

New Theme

Next, I need to find a new theme to use.

• This one looks nice, but has some server side code I’d need to work around if I host for free on GitHub
• This one is simple and static.

After looking at the first one again, it looks like he’s hosted on github-pages too, so I think I’ll start there.

Setup

I downloaded the .zip file from his GitHub, extract it, and open in VS Code. Looking at package.json I see the usual SvelteKit scripts: dev, build, preview. He also has a deploy script for gh-pages to publish the build folder, and some prettier stuff for linting and formatting.

I’ll run npm install and see what happens. No errors.

I think I’ll need to change the build script though, since I’m on Windows, and I don’t think it will recognize the rm -rf ... command, though PowerShell does use some Unix commands, so who knows.

Let’s try npm run dev. Errors: config.kit.target is no longer required, and should be removed.

In svelte.config.js I’ll remove the target from kit: {....

Now when I run, there are no errors in the console, but the page (localhost:3000) has an error: Unrecognized option 'enableSourcemap'.

After searching a bit, I may need to update svelte or some other decency. I’ll run npm update. That seemed to fix it.

I see the site, but when I scroll down and up, it crashes and gives another error: [plugin:vite-plugin-svelte] Error while preprocessing C:/Users/Frankie/Documents/Code/blog/src/lib/posts/web-workers.md - Cannot read property 'buildPlaceholders' of undefined.

I run npm install again to see if that fixes anything. Nope.

I’m able to open the resume page fine, but all of the blog posts are broken because of the issue.

I wonder if I need to run the postbuild script to run svelte-sitemap, just guessing. I’ll need to make the build script Windows PowerShell friendly first.

I added a file called .nojekyll to the /static directory. Then the build script just becomes svelte-kit build.

I’m also going to remove the Plausible analytics. I’ll just comment out the scripts in the head of app.html.

Still not working. I see someone posted the same issue. I was able to fix the latter issue that’s linked, but I haven’t been able to fix the mdsvex/prismjs problem.