Wordpress Export to Markdown Hosted on Amazon S3

You may have been able to tell, but this blog looks different. Yes, I finally left Wordpress. I converted my Wordpress blog to a static generated Markdown blog. It's fairly straight forward.

Why?

I hated writing my blog posts in Wordpress. I wanted to write in pure Markdown since I'm such a big open source advocate and have been using Markdown a lot with Github.
I wanted complete control on the look and the feel.
I hate the idea of maintaining a server for a blog.

Must Haves:

Must not break any links. For obvious SEO purposes. That's why I'm using Amazon S3 over Github.
Must be able to use existing comments. (Disqus handled this beautifully)
Must be able to control the entire look and feel.

How?

It's pretty straightforward:

Installed Pandoc: http://code.google.com/p/pandoc/downloads/list
Exported my Wordpress blog from a tool that I wrote: https://github.com/jprichardson/potter-wordpress
Dumped my comments from Wordpress export and imported them using Disqus import tool. You'll need to use an XML sanitization tool on the Wordpress exported XML data... I don't remember what I used, but if you Google for it, I'm sure you can find it. I think I used xmllint.
Followed Amazon tutorial on redirecting www.procbits.com to procbits.com and keep all links in tact.
Wrote my own static blog generator (all the cool kids are doing it), Sky, to actually create the html.
Deployed to S3 using another tool that I wrote (Basin): https://github.com/skywrite/basin.

There are still a lot of things to do. But for now, I'm satisfied.

If you made it this far, you should follow me on Twitter.

-JP

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