As mentioned, I’m moving my blog to octopress. I got tired of php, php-cgi, wordpress, security holes, constant updates that broke random plugins, 5 second page loads, fragile caching plugins, and all the various nonsense that wordpress brings to the table.

An aside: php-cgi is so fragile and crashes so often I ran a screen session as root that just attempted to restart it every 5 seconds (attached below for any poor souls stuck using this tech.)

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# run as root inside screen
for (( ; ; )); do /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -u nginx -g nginx -f /usr/bin/php-cgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 53217 -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid; sleep 5; done

For googlers who want to move from wordpress to octopress, here’s how I moved 70-odd posts with minimal pain.

1 – Get thomasf’s excellent python script (accurately named exitwp) that converts wordpress posts to octopress posts. This will create one octopress post per wordpress post in the source directory.

2 – I simultaneously moved urls from blog.earlh.com to earlh.com/blog so I needed to 301 all the old posts. I did that by getting this awesome wordpress post exporter script contributed by Mike Schinkel. I curled that to create a list of urls to forward, then built a tsv of pairs of old url\tnewurl. Then the below awk script will print nginx forward rules:

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cat posts.tsv | awk -F"\t" '{print "\tlocation " $2 "{\n\t\treturn 301 " $1 ";\n\t\tbreak;\t}"'} | sed "s/http:\/\/blog.earlh.com//"

The rules look like:

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location /index.php/2009/06/cleaning-data-in-r-csv-files {
        return 301 http://earlh.com/blog/2009/06/29/cleaning-data-in-r-csv-files/;
        break;
}

Add them to your site nginx.conf file inside the server configuration block.

I’ll update with solutions for better image embedding.