One of the goals I've set myself to do this year (not as a new year resolution though, I *really* want to accomplish this ;-) is to move my blog from Wordpress to a statically built website. And Pelican looks to be a good solution to do so. It's based on Python, which is readily available and supported on Gentoo, and is quite readable. Also, it looks to be very active in development and support. And also: it supports taking data from an existing Wordpress installation, so that none of the posts are lost (with some rounding error that's inherit to such migrations of course).

Before getting Pelican ready (which is available through Gentoo btw) I also needed to install pandoc, and that became more troublesome than expected. While installing pandoc I got hit by its massive amount of dependencies towards dev-haskell/* packages, and many of those packages really failed to install. It does some internal dependency checking and fails, informing me to run haskell-updater. Sadly, multiple re-runs of said command did not resolve the issue. In fact, it wasn't until I hit a forum post about the same issue that a first step to a working solution was found.

It turns out that the ~arch versions of the haskell packages are better working. So I enabled dev-haskell/* in my package.accept_keywords file. And then started updating the packages... which also failed. Then I ran haskell-updater multiple times, but that also failed. After a while, I had to run the following set of commands (in random order) just to get everything to build fine:

~# emerge -u $(qlist -IC dev-haskell) --keep-going
~# for n in $(qlist -IC dev-haskell); do emerge -u $n; done

It took quite some reruns, but it finally got through. I never thought I had this much Haskell-related packages installed on my system (89 packages here to be exact), as I never intended to do any Haskell development since I left the university. Still, I finally got pandoc to work. So, on to the migration of my Wordpress site... I thought.

This is a good time to ask for stabilization requests (I'll look into it myself as well of course) but also to see if you can help out our arch testing teams to support the stabilization requests on Gentoo! We need you!

I started with the official docs on importing. Looks promising, but it didn't turn out too well for me. Importing was okay, but then immediately building the site again resulted in issues about wrong arguments (file names being interpreted as an argument name or function when an underscore was used) and interpretation of code inside the posts. Then I found Jason Antman's converting wordpress posts to pelican markdown post to inform me I had to try using markdown instead of restructured text. And lo and behold - that's much better.

The first builds look promising. Of all the posts that I made on Wordpress, only one gives a build failure. The next thing to investigate is theming, as well as seeing how good the migration goes (it isn't because there are no errors otherwise that the migration is successful of course) so that I know how much manual labor I have to take into consideration when I finally switch (right now, I'm still running Wordpress).