First Steps with Middleman

Middleman is a simple static site generator in Ruby. You create your site in markdown, run the builder and deploy, like you might an application. As a developer, this suites me, and after watching a friends succcess I thought I’d see how hard it was to migrate my own blog.

I ended up doing the following steps:

• Exporting the pages from Drupal as a CSV file, using ™ and € as delimiters :)
• Writing a script that parsed the CSV file, extracting the date, title and content and creating a blog post for each page.
• Tweaking the output several times to fix problems, e.g. un-closed tags, stop-words in page title.
• As it doesn’t support /?=… style URLs, I created a 404 page with a list of the most popular posts.
• Running my link checker to check I’d not broken too many links.
• Updating the template to have Google Analytics tracking, and Disqus comments.
• Manually inspecting the most popular pages for errors.
• Checking on mobile and tablet.
• Enabling a Rakefile to publish it to Github Pages for preview.

I’d already trimmed my site down when I moved it to EC2. This time I lost the recent post, recent comments and tags. I may try to reinstate the tags.