Easier and Harder Than Expected

I have spent the better part of this afternoon and evening trying to get my content from Scopique.com into the new site hosted at GitHub Pages.

The first step was to download the XML file for my posts. I had almost 300 of them in there — published only — but they were in XML format. I don’t know if there’s already a tool out there that can parse and split WordPress XML into individual files, but I set Claude on it and it did a really good job. I told it which XML nodes matched up to what frontmatter, and it sorted each <item> into an individual file with the appropriate tags and folder structure. I did have to wrestle with it for a bit, mainly because I realized I kept leaving things out, but in the end I’m happy with the results.

One interesting side-effect was that, because WordPress uses absolute paths complete with the domain name to serve images, all of the posts on the new site have complete URLs pointing to images being hosted at Scopique.com. This is great for setting things up, but it’s going to really suck when and if I decide to run with this new site. I’m thinking of maybe hosting images in the Cloud or maybe on my own in-house server (h/t to @Mindstrike for that suggestion). I’d just need to figure a way to organize the images and make them accessible from the outside.

At the end of the day: is it worth it? I have to set up a page by hand with the frontmatter and, if I want to embed images in the body of the post, I have to import a special Astro component so I can take advantage of Astro’s image handlers. That means I have to use .mdx files instead of .md files which isn’t really a chore, and I should be doing it anyway as it gives me access to components that regular Markdown can’t use, but…I’m old, and my memory sucks. I think I’ll need a cheat-sheet or some way to automate standing up a new file whenever I want to add a new post.

I’m starting to think that maybe it would be easier to just switch from blogging to vlogging.