Blog moved to Ghost

After almost 12 years I moved my personal blog blog.zopyx.com from Plone 4 to the Ghost blogging platform. You may ask why? First, my old Plone 4 installation reached end of lifetime a long time ago and it was time for moving the content to a different system. I investigated a lot of time into options like static site generators like Eleventy, Huge and others but I was not very much happy with them. I just wanted a simple system where I can add and publish content easily.

The migration from Plone 4 to Ghost was a bit painful. First, I tried to use plone.restapi or collective.jsonify but the Plone 4 site gave me a bunch of headaches and errors. So I decided to create a static copy of the original bog using httrack. With some Python code I was able to extract the content part from the HTML markup of each document and some necessary metadata like publication date, title, description etc. All extracted data was written to a JSON file.

Ghost itself provides some JSON format as import/export format. Due to limited resources I hired a Ghost developer (for a very small budget) that converted my JSON format into the Ghost JSON format.

Then setting up Ghost (running in a Docker container) behind Apache was more or less straight-forward. As with every new system: you need to learn and try things out.

For the moment, I am happy with the result and outcome. There are clearly some issues like a better theme or some CSS fixes to be implemented.

I hope to blog again more in the future.