Life With Alacrity Blog

Migrating the blog Life With Alacrity from hosted typepad to static standalone

Setting up

install Hugo

The static site generator used is Hugo - https://gohugo.io/ Install that on your system using https://github.com/spf13/hugo/releases (current site built with v0.16) This was not built from source or modified; all the changes are to templates within this repository

Installing

Checkout this repository and the lifewithalacrity.github.io one into the same directory (that way the transformation scripts run unmodified) You'll also need a python 2.7 install to run the legacy import scripts.

Previewing

preview the site by running Hugo locally

cd blog
hugo server

This will generate the pages in ram and serve on http://localhost:1313/ It should also detect changes int he path and regenerate, but if this gets out of sync, stop and restart the process. You can override the theme if desired with eg hugo server --theme=simple-a

Adding a post

Put a markdown file inside blog/content/post/ to create a new post. The posts need a header in yaml (or toml) to specify title, slug tags etc eg (for one I manually added)

---
title: "Smarter Signatures: Experiments in Verifications"
slug: "smarter-signatures"
date: "2016-06-28T17:20:54Z"
---

or for one imported from the dumps (see below)

---
title: "Defining “Participatory Ecosystem” — Grow the Pie, Not Slice It!"
slug: "defining-participatory-ecosystem-grow-the-pie-not-slice-it"
url: "/2016/04/defining-participatory-ecosystem-grow-the-pie-not-slice-it.html"
tags:
  - "Entrepreneuring"
  - "Security"
  - "Social Software"
  - "Social Web for Social Change #SW4SX"
  - "Web/Tech"
date: "2016-04-05T23:07:58-07:00"
---

Then when you rebuild, this will show up on the homepage, in the tags etc.

Generating

Once you like the new post layout, quit the preview and generate the pages

cd blog
hugo

That will build into the github.io directory so you can see diffs in git once built

Deploying

Currently done by committing to the lifewithalacrity.github.io master, so github deploys it.

Translating the archival blog

making the staic copy in /previous

The copy in lifewithalacrity.github.io/previous was fetched with spiderpig into the raw dumps directory, then had all the absolute URLs made relative with makerelative.py using the mung.py script. This needs an intermediate scratchspace folder as there are 2 separate URL paths that needed relativising. This should not need to be run again, as the archive is there and working. From the LifeWithAlacrity directory do

mkdir ../scratchspace
python mung.py

generating Hugo compatible files from the MoveableType dump

This is done using mt2hugo.py (based on https://github.com/pra85/google-blog-converters-appengine). Run

python mt2hugo.py raw\ dumps/lifewithalactity.txt blog/content/post

This had moved from a generic exporter to having some code that is specific to LifeWithAlacrity to handle FB posts and relativize URLs, done in _TranslateContents().