The annual website migration

Thu, 09 Mar 2023

A little over a year ago, I migrated from a bloated WordPress install with all kinds of WooCommerce plugins, to a static website generated with Jekyll. It worked pretty well. I am an elder nerd who doesn't mind poking around down in the templates and things, and Jekyll got me a lot closer to the metal than a house-of-cards WordPress install did, but I never quite had an excuse to sit down and get some of the deeper oddities fixed, like the weirdly-carried-over categories and tags.

All of which is to say, I blew out my other knee this past weekend, and since I needed to spend some time sitting around letting the swelling go down, I decided to fix the website... by throwing out Jekyll and writing a static blog processor in Perl. As one does.

Things that are still wonky:

• Template Toolkit doesn't like my hyphenated names which, fair. So embroidery-patterns is now embroidery_patterns and so forth. I'm still tracking down all the places that occurs, but in the meantime you should just be able to edit the URL in your browser bar, except:

• I have finally eliminated the files directory, which means everything that points to a direct download here is currently broken. A lot of these designs have been moved into the current digital downloads section, but all the older files are going to get bundled up into a single "please don't think my current products are just undocumented stitch files like these" download.

• Shop entries have started getting put in their own subcategories. If a direct link fails, chances are if you do something like convert /shop/in-the-hoop-flopsy-pug-design/ to /shop/downloadables/in-the-hoop-flopsy-pug-design.html it will work. Or just navigate from the shop home, it's not that large, except:

• I've also started moving the late unlamented Shopify entries over to Ko-Fi. And I've imported them all into the blog shop, but where the Ko-Fi entries aren't there, there's just a "not currently listed" message. Physical items probably won't get listed until after the move, when I re-inventory everything so I don't have some kind of panicked "it's sold, what moving box is it still in?" moment. They aren't packed yet, so if you see something you want you can ping me and I can probably list it.

• Tags still aren't live, because I haven't tagged any posts for the last year because tags were broken. So I'll probably be re-categorizing and re-tagging everything.

• Pretty sure some of the vintage WordPress images are broken on older posts.

I mean, it's only 499 entries to clean up. An even five hundred tomorrow, when the heart charm goes public.