Bye, Bye, WordPress. Hello, micro.blog!
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Since Matt started his crazy little campaign at the end of the last year, I had the desire to get rid of WordPress and move elsewhere. First, I thought a bit about using Hugo or so. But this was too much work for my little, low-volume blog. And I also wanted a service that lets me post from my browser and while I am using my mobile. It should be simple, too. Micro.blog is a natural choice then.
The transition from WordPress was super easy. I set up my blog and followed the instructions from the help section covering the WordPress import.
Lessons learned during my first attempt
- Every tag and category is mapped to a category in here. Bad, because I didn’t want 100+ categories on my new blog.
- The process takes some time, even though I had the impression that it was finished quickly. This caused me to start the process with different exports several times. Afterward I had every post many times in my post list, every image was imported many times too, and I ended up with a total mess.
- The post-only export doesn’t seem to work. You have to export the complete WordPress content for the import process to succeed.
Having to delete 100 posts and 200 images one by one let me prepare my second attempt a bit better.
My second attempt
Before, I did the following on the WordPress side:
- Deleted all tags and categories I would rather not see in micro.blog.
- Deleted posts that I didn’t want to migrate.
Then I did a complete export, did one import and everything worked like a charm.
In the end, I only migrated 8 posts from the 28 on WordPress. Most of them just worked after the import, I only had to fix all the code blocks because I used a somewhat obscure code block plugin on WordPress.
Now I am here and satisfied with the results. The tweaking of the theme was easy from my perspective. The backend is simple and just works. The only annoyance I have seen so far, the editor automatically reloads occasionally, which made me finish this post in an external editor. I have to investigate if this is a feature, a problem with my browser or something else. Maybe it is also an option to use a client like MarsEdit or Ulysses.