Since I decided to shut down WordPress I was looking for a solution, how I could still run this blog and also be able to post new content. So I dived deeper to the topic. I already heard of Static Site Generators, of course. But never used one.
Someone recommended me to use 11ty, so I'm currently playing around with it a bit. It's pretty easy to use. I actually like that I can right my content in Markdown now.
My blog exists since 2011(!). While many of the posts aren't that good anymore, I still want to keep them. ^^ I'm glad, there are solutions to export WordPress content and convert it to Markdown, so I can use it on my 11ty site. wordpress-export-to-markdown worked pretty great for me.
I did run two separated blogs: LGK Blog and Neue.St. Since I decided to not WordPress anymore anywhere, I think it might be a good thing, to bring the posts of both blogs together for this new SSG blog.
With wordpress-export-to-markdown it was pretty easy, to convert Neue.St's posts to Markdown as well.
So all content is now combined in this blog.
I'm now planning to make this 11ty site to my main site. lgk.io is currently running with PHP and its frontend is a React SPA. I want to get away of being forced to have a PHP-compatible web server. And I like 11ty, so I want to bring all other segments of my website to this code project.
As a first step, I moved all blog post content to the sub folder /blog. This will bring some more structure. Unfortunately this might break some older links that point to the old URLs. But I also added a 404 page which will help visitors to get to the right article:
I also added some more tools. Webpack is nice to bundle my JavaScript and CSS files and some more asset files. I replaced the pretty simplified CSS framework chota.css with a customized Bootstrap. With PurgeCSS only necessary CSS code will be excluded to the final CSS file for the website.
Read the next update in this post