, 3 min read

Moved Blog To eklausmeier.goip.de

Original post is here eklausmeier.goip.de/blog/2021/05-18-moved-blog-to-eklausmeier-goip-de.


The blog eklausmeier.wordpress.com is no longer maintained. I moved to eklausmeier.goip.de, i.e., this one. During migration I corrected a couple of minor typos and dead links.

Main reasons for the move:

  1. This new WordPress editor put the last nail in the coffin, existing content is garbled once you edit it
  2. Math typesetting is quite arduous; I would like to have full MathJax support
  3. Overall slow
  4. Importing does not allow to overwrite posts, unless you delete everything first

Nevertheless, I started blogging in WordPress since January 2008, really used it starting in 2012. Collected more than 120 thousand views and almost 100 thousand visitors. One should not forget, in all fairness, that WordPress never charged me a dime.

Had WordPress not deleted the so called "Classical Editor", I would probably still be with WordPress. As expected the move from WordPress to this blog took quite some time as I had to migrate ca. 300 blog posts.

This blog is now powered by Saaze written by Gilbert Pellegrom. As of today it looks like that the Saaze website and this blog are the onliest websites using Saaze. Initially Gilbert Pellegrom also powered his blog with Saaze, but has since migrated away to Webflow. This keeps me puzzled about the long-term survival of Saaze. [Added 23-Jan-2022: His website is now using Gridsome. In his "Projects" page he does not list Saaze.]

I have already written on Saaze here: Lesser Known Static Site Generators.

I stumbled upon Saaze by accident. I initially took a look at Stati from Jonathan Foucher, who wrote about it in his blog post Stati, a PHP static site generator that works on any existing Jekyll site. Stati is Jekyll compatible. From there I got to Pico written by Gilbert Peegrom, and from there to Saaze.

Migration took me roughly one month. Of course, I didn't work on this full-time. But during the migration I did not write any new posts in WordPress. The steps in the migration were:

  1. Adapted wp2hugo.go to wp2saaze.go, which converted WordPress XML export file to a set of Markdown files.
  2. Wrote a Saaze extension, called MathParser.php, to handle math, YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, etc.
  3. Wrote mkdwnrss Perl script to create an RSS feed from Markdown files.

The move away from WordPress was made easy, as I had previously checked on various static site generators and had closer contact with Hugo, for which I already wrote a converter, see Converting WordPress Export File to Hugo. Getting all search-and-replace strings right, getting the regular expressions right was the most time consuming. Writing an Saaze extension was pretty straightforward. I also played a little bit with the Laravel Blade templates, and with TailwindCSS.

Did the blog-move cure the above problems with WordPress?

  1. There is definitely no more automatic garbling of one's own content. Content is in pure Markdown. It is easier to write than the previous WordPress mix of HTML and pseudo-Markdown. This destruction of my content was the trigger point for me to say: "enough is enough". Editing is much more enjoyable with vi as using some browser-based editor with WordPress. In particular it is very easy to edit full-screen.
  2. Math typesetting with MathJax makes things way easier. For example, I can now use \eqalign again. In WordPress I used some clumsy work-arounds for that.
  3. During writing of new articles I run php saaze serve and the pages are presented immediately. This is way faster than WordPress's "View" feature, which usually takes a few seconds to present the new post. Actual publishing/deploying as static content takes less than two seconds on an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3400G, max clocked with 3.7 GHz.
  4. As all content is plain Markdown, with some Yaml-header, it can easily be saved, zipped, and moved. In particular, it can also easily be processed by scripts.