Having gone nuts and done a clean install of El Capitan, I'm trying to recover bits of my working life. Mostly, that is going well. But not with my main website. I moved that from a well-dodgy WordPress installation to a static site generated by Octopress a few years ago, and while I enjoyed getting that system up and running, I didn't really want to go through it all again. It is just too inflexible for my needs.

Even before the clean install, I had been casting around for a replacement, without lighting on anything. Then, a post by Ben Brooks mentioned a CMS new to me: Grav. I took a look around and liked what I saw, although it did also seem a bit intimidating. But the tutorials are really clear and relatively simple, and I soon had a local version up and running.

That made me like it more. Enough, in fact, to start thinking about transferring all 1413 entries from the archive.

Grav and Octopress both use a special section of front matter to tell the system what to do with the content that follows, and for a while I thought I might attempt to do some fancy stuff and automate converting one to the other. Good sense prevailed. So I went back to the first of the 1413 posts 1 and copied it into my local website.

That worked fine, but I took the opportunity to check the link it contained, and of course it had rotted away. A bit of searching turned up the piece to which the link referred, but that is now behind a paywall. And you know what? That site can go get stuffed.

That blog post will now exist only in my archive, if I decide to keep it. And I will take the opportunity to check each post.

I may be some time.


  1. Which is by no means the first ever of my posts, but that's another story. 

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