When I started thinking about bringing back the SQL Server Diaries blog, my starting point (and the only source to recover the old material) was an eight-year old WordPress export. Those who use Wordpress know that the data can be exported as a series of MySQL INSERT statements, as well as a XML file which can be imported through the WordPress UI. Luckily I had both.

I also had copies of most of my posts as plain TXT files, as well as all the attachments and image files referenced in the articles.

Between the time I launched the site in January 2010 and when it was brought offline in December 2012, I had published more than 100 posts. Compared to some bloggers, this is not a substantial amount, however it isn’t a small number either.

A new blogging platform?

Everybody knows that technology moves at a rapid pace, and blogging platforms are no exception. I started looking at the available options, and of course the easiest would have been WordPress. I was already in possession of the domain through another Registrar, however I didn’t want to self-host a WordPress site and end up supporting it too. The only way to have a WordPress site with a Custom Domain and no Tech Support from my side was to transfer to WP, and pay a monthly charge.

Some 18 months ago a friend suggested using an open source flat-file CMS called Grav. I had used a similar solution written in ASP.NET way back, which stored data as XML files in the “App_Data” folder, and required IIS for hosting. I liked the concept as it removed the need of a database (e.g. WordPress depends on MySQL), and I was so intrigued by the idea, that I started looking into what developments had been made since.

I also looked at writing in one of the already established platforms, such as LinkedIn, Medium, and ITNEXT to name a few. Avoiding my own Tech Support and the possibility of making something extra out of my writing was tempting, however this meant that the old content would not be republished.

A final option that I looked into briefly, was hosting within Azure Storage. This however also came with a Tech Support requirement, as well as a monthly charge.

GitHub to the rescue

That is when I discovered GitHub Pages. I have been using GitHub as a repository for projects and scripts I write in my spare time, and the familiarity was a breath of fresh air. The only caveat at the time was that I would have to learn how to configure and use this blogging platform called Jekyll. I later came to realise that my fears were unfounded.

So I followed the instructions, created a repository, cloned the repository, threw in my first “Hello World” in an index.html file, pushed it to GitHub, and there it was!

Next, I went looking at how I was going to set up a local copy of Jekyll on my workstation. This is where a Docker container came in handy. I had been using SQL Server 2017 and later SQL Server 2019 on Linux in Docker containers for a couple of years, so I was already familiar with the technology. A couple of online articles provided valuable guidance:

Once I had Jekyll up and running in a Docker Container, a docker-compose.yml file mapping the site volume correctly, and with two sample SQL Server Diaries posts converted to Markdown, I went on to look for themes. I found these at Jekyll Themes. I chose the Beautiful Jekyll, and setting up the theme template was pretty straightforward.

Conversion

This is when the pain started. I had around 100 articles, some of which contained encoded HTML, to convert to Markdown. I used a mixture of Visual Studio Code and Joplin to edit the MD files. In the case of VSCode, I decided to use the Markdown All in One and the markdownlint extensions for VSCode to review and visualise the content.

The Markdown syntax cheatsheet from the GitHub Guides proved to be very useful, as was the Joplin Markdown Guide. The first few were fun, because I was learning as I went along. Like every repetitive action, this became a chore and by the 15th file I started looking for ways to speed up the process.

The quickest (or so I thought) was to use a HTML to Markdown converter, such as this: Convert HTML to Markdown. It worked for me however I later came across other bloggers’ experiences where more efficient approaches were used. Here’s one example by Chrissy LeMaire - Migrating my WordPress sites to GitHub Pages.

Final touches

Once all the articles had been converted, and all looked right, next was to configure other components of the website. These included:

That’s it! I got the site working on my test environment, and the final step was to check in all the Markdown files and see how it would work out.