I started this website 20 years ago as a means to learn Django, which made sense, as at the time I wished to do everything myself: website and hosting, running my own mail server, dns server, and probably something else, too. Over time my desire to spend time on these activities dwindled, and I move my content to blogger.

Year by year I wrote fewer articles, and then it became years since I wrote anything. Perhaps it was the UI for blogger or the niggling feeling that Google could kill it off at any time, or perhaps it was having a kid. Eventually the libraries were no longer maintained. This weekend I opted to:

• Remove as many libraries as possible
• Move from Blogger to Github Pages

Intially I gave Jekyll a go, as GH Pages natively supports it, but Jekyll seems to be on its way out as a static site generator (e.g. the pagenate plugin hasn’t been updated in like 7 years, and you can’t natively use other plugsin in Github). I gave Hugo a go, and it worked incredibly well.

Here is an overview of what I had to do:

• Read this page and follow almost all of the steps.
• Created this script to download the full size images from Blogger. Run it with python src/download_images.py after installing by pip install requests. I had about 250MB of images, so beware if you have a lot, at Pages has a limit of 1GB storage.
• Created this script to replace any remaining links to picasaweb or blogger with just the image name located next to it. You might not need to run this.
• Leveraged a lot of concepts from the PaperMod theme, but kept the theme as close to my original theme as possible.
• If you want to use an apex (’naked’) domain, then you need to use the entire Github Pages domain as your entire repo name. For example, username.github.io, or see here for an example
• Added a custom domain, which I found the documentation to be a bit out of date. From what I remember just point the apex domain to Github’s IPs, and use a CNAME for the www subdomain.

Github IPs

• 185.199.108.153
• 185.199.109.153
• 185.199.110.153
• 185.199.111.153

Updating DNS records