The migration, mentioned in the previous post is in the works! I have successfully:
- gotten my Drupal 8 site running locally again; I'd set it up to run on ddev, but I go so long between bouts of touching it, that it's always been a bit dicey whether I'd actually remember how to do it again;
- pulled a copy of the production database back to the local installation, which was far harder than it should have been (again, having done not-regularly-enough, the habits hadn't formed);
- successfully installed several modules locally using Composer, including Views Data Export, which I did use, and Markdown Exporter, which I really wanted to use but could not get to work correctly;
- wondered, at this point, why I was migrating out of Drupal at all, because it was starting to feel sort of fun to play with again, before realizing how inanely overblown this whole thing was for a basic personal blog;
- ran a couple successful iterations of Views Data Export until I got a file that I felt like I could work with;
- looked, briefly, in vain for CSV-to-Markdown-file splitter-upper apps, before I went ahead and wrote up my own Python script to do basically exactly what I wanted it to do, reminding myself in the process that Python is fun and I like doing stuff with it and why don't I do more stuff with it anyway, question mark;
- moved all my output files into place and did some other in-the-new-system work to get some things working the way I sort of want them to work (splitting up the lists of links on the homepage by category, for example, and also hotwiring my newUpdate node script to handle putting my new update markdown files into the right directories, and so on);
- started writing this post.
I am, as I write this, realizing a few things that are left to do:
- There are bits of content that didn't successfully export from the old system. Images, some badly escaped character codes, that sort of thing. I'll probably go back and manually move and fix them because it's not that much to do by hand and scripting it (or whatever) might be more of a pain than it's worth.
- Get some next/previous pagination links on the various post pages. Pagination in Eleventy should make this easy, I think?
- Move the "all links" off the home page to stand-alone pages.
- Set up tag link pages. So you can click on a tag and see everything with that tag, somehow.
- Apply some portion of my design skills to actually implementing a design for this site for the first time ever, maybe?
- Make an actual about page. Do I have one of those yet?
Optimistically, I also hope to:
- Implement a draft mode for content. That's a thing, right? Or do I just dump draft content into separate branches? That feels like too much work.
- Set up some kind of microblog category to which I can post via phone/web interface somehow. I mean, it might be as basic as an Airtable base that Eleventy grabs data from periodically? I don't know. I haven't thought too hard about this yet.
So: I'm happy with how this is going. One really cool thing about Eleventy is that it let me leave all the exported content from Drupal in HTML format; I dumped everything (via the Python script) into front-matter'ed Handlebars files, and they're just all out there alongside my new Markdown files, and everything is just magically fine. It's fine! How fun is that?