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Summary: Migrate Your Ghost Blog to Jekyll

Wayyyy back when I was just a little itty bitty programmer, I started this blog using the Ghost platform with the default Casper theme. The blog ran dutifully in the background on Microsoft Azure for over a decade. But you know what? I just didn’t want to pay for it anymore. What follows is a summary of how to migrate your Ghost blog into Jekyll so you can host your blog for free with GitHub pages.

Many of these steps are going to be accompanied by AI prompts to speed things along and reduce manual labor.

Steps

  1. Take inventory of your current blog and complete a backup
  2. Set up Jekyll locally so you can test and draft new posts (like I’m doing right now!)
  3. Convert your Ghost posts into Markdown for Jekyll
  4. Migrate all of your assets and fix their paths
  5. Preserve URLs and SEO (if you care about that sort of thing)
  6. Deploy to GitHub Pages
  7. Cutover the domain
  8. Validate your new blog and deprecate the old one

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll flesh out specific posts for each of those steps, helping explain the migration process along the way.

Do You Really Want to Do This?

At some point in the process of the migration, I thought to myself “Do I really want to preserve all these old posts?” and then “Why do I want to preserve the old blog?” It certainly would be easier to just start from scratch.

Pros to keeping your old posts

  • You spent the time writing; you should keep them around
  • If you’re internet famous, you’ll want to preserve links and content for others
  • I’m definitely sentimental about the old posts
  • If you’re going to write again, it will show the progression of your voice and skills over time

Cons

  • Who you are as an engineer now may have no bearing on what you wrote eons ago
  • This is going to take a good deal of time and perhaps use some AI tokens
  • Does the internet need another personal engineering blog?
  • Are you really going to write more in the future?

My Conclusion

I’m a bit of a sentimentalist and have always had a hard time throwing perfectly good things away. I like what I wrote and I’d like to write more. This blog migration was a great way for me to practice leveraging AI for a decent-sized refactor.