Blog migration complete
Published on 3 February 2020 at 18:17 by
Since I first discovered dev.to as a viable blogging platform (or I as I like to think of it, MySpace for Programmers), I've been migrating my blog posts. Initially, and until today, that looked like this.
First, I take an old blog post, such as this one Melatonin Busting Glasses. I'd copy the markdown into this editor, set the title and tags, add an image, and then remove the frontmatter (a YAML header often used for metadata) and save the post.
Each day, I'd do a few, finding new header images, and each time adding a little note saying "Originally posted on x, 2013" etc, with a link to a post explaining it. A lot of the posts were outdated, but, I keep them with me as I move from blog to blog, ten years of writing.
Then, tonight, I forgot to remove the frontmatter from a blog post, and WHAM! the blog post had the date set as 2013. Not only did I find a way to set the date to the original posting date, but I could also make my life easier by creating a generic cover image for every post!
So, for the last hour or so, I've just been copy pasting markdown files with the cover image added, one by one, into the write post. I was worried I was spamming the feed but I think actually that's not the case.
For the few posts which I already posted, I can't seem to now change the date of those, so I'll leave them as they are as they have comments. But, it's fair to say now, that at 191 posts and what felt like 74 hours of copy pasting manually, I've now migrated my blog to dev.to!