This blog has been hosted on scriptogram for the past year or so. Unfortunately, while I like the publish-via-Dropbox mechanism, there have been enough problems recently that I’ve finally switched over to using GitHub Pages for hosting. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, but the things that finally pushed me to make the change were:

Sync problems that would prevent new posts from appearing (and that at least once caused posts to disappear).
Lack of any response to bug reports by the site maintainers.

A benefit of the publish-via-Dropbox mechanism is, of course, that I already had all the data and didn’t need to go through any sort of export process.

Fixing metadata⌗

Like scriptogram, GitHub Pages is also a Markdown-based solution. GitHub uses Jekyll to render Markdown to HTML, which requires some metadata at the beginning of each post. On scriptogram the file headers looked like this:

Title: A random collection of OpenStack Tools
Date: 2013-11-12
Tags: openstack

Whereas the corresponding header for GitHub would look like this:

---
layout: post
title: A random collection of OpenStack Tools
date: 2013-11-12
tags:
  - openstack
---

I was able to generally automate this with the following script:

#!/bin/sh

for post in "$@"; do
  sed -i '
  1,/^$/ {
    1 i\---
    1 i\layout: post

    s/Title:/title:/
    s/Date:/date:/
    s/Tags:/tags:/

    /^$/ i\---
  }
  ' $post
done

The tags: header need further processing to transform them into a YAML list. That means something like:

tags: foo,bar,baz

Would need to end up looking like:

tags:
  - foo
  - bar
  - baz

While that’s not entirely accurate – YAML supports multiple list syntaxes and I could have just expressed that as [foo,bar,baz] – I prefer this extended syntax and got there via the following awk script:

BEGIN {state=0}

state == 1 && /^tags:/ {
  tags=$2
  next
}

state == 1 && /^---$/ {
  if (tags) {
    split(tags, taglist, ",")
    print "tags:"
    for (t in taglist)
      print "  -", taglist[t]
  }

  state=2
}

state == 0 && /^---$/ { state=1 }

{print}

(This would process a single post; I wrapped it in a shell script to run it across all the posts.)

Redirecting legacy links⌗

In order to preserve links pointing at the old blog I needed to generate a bunch of HTML redirect files. Scriptogram posts had permalinks of the form /post/<slug>, where <slug> was computed from the post aliases: ["/2013/11/13/moving-to-github/"] title. GitHub posts (with permalinks: pretty) have the form /<year>/<month>/<day>/<title>, where <title> comes from the filename rather than the post metadata.

I automated the generation of redirects with the following script:

#!/bin/sh

for post in _posts/*; do
  # read the title from the post metadata
  title=$(grep '^title:' $post)
  title=${title/title: /}

  # convert the title from the metadata into the slug
  # used by scriptogram
  slug=${title,,}
  slug=${slug// /-}
  slug=${slug//[.,:?\/\'\"]/}

  # parse the post filename into year, month, day, and title
  # as used by github
  post_name=${post/_posts\//}
  post_date=${post_name:0:10}
  post_title=${post_name:11}
  post_title=${post_title:0:$(( ${#post_title} - 3))}
  post_year=${post_date%%-*}
  tmp=${post_date#*-}
  post_month=${tmp%%-*}
  post_day=${post_date##*-}

  # the url at which the post is available on github
  new_url="/$post_year/$post_month/$post_day/$post_title/"
  
  # generate the html redirect file
  mkdir -p post/$slug
  sed "s|URL|$new_url|g" redirect.html > post/$slug/index.html
done

Where redirect.html looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="URL"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=URL" />
</head>
</html>

So given a file _posts/2013-11-12-a-random-collection.md, this would result in a new file post/a-random-collection-of-openstack-tools/index.html with the following content:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="/2013/11/12/a-random-collection/"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/2013/11/12/a-random-collection/" />
</head>
</html>

With this in place, a URL such as http://blog.oddbit.com/post/a-random-collection-of-openstack-tools goes to the right place.

Update: It turns out that it has been almost exactly a year since I moved from Blogger to Scriptogram.

Moving to GitHub

Fixing metadata⌗

Redirecting legacy links⌗