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So, I used to have this blog.

I used to write here on and off, about different subjects that interested me: technology, astronomy, science fiction, travel… I mostly stopped in 2011; I published a couple of posts after that, but very infrequently; from 2018 to 2020 I used it to publish photos I had taken, with some commentary, just so that Instagram was not the only place where they were published. And then 2020 happened, and I stopped that too.

Reading old posts, my interests haven’t changed all that much, and I’ve been kind of missing having some place to write and post… stuff. Even if there’s noone really reading it.

Then, this is it – let’s try again. The first thing I did was to change this from a Wordpress blog to something that allows me to simply serve static pages - I’m running this with Jekyll, and this means I have all the source content on my desktop machine, as markdown files, and when I want to publish updates I just run jekyll build and I “deploy” the changes with rsync; my webhost has only static HTML and CSS files, which is a lot safer than, well, self-hosted Wordpress.

I also imported all the old content into Jekyll, which took a few tries but was not terribly hard to do; I exported the posts using Wordpress’s “export” function, which gave me a large XML file, and then I used the jekyll-import plugin to split that into individual posts. I had some issues with character encoding for posts that were not pure ASCII (some posts mention the names of Icelandic places and needed to be fixed), and some posts that linked to images needed some adjustments (but I imagine they were already broken in the old blog), but then it was just a matter of selecting a nice theme (I went with Beautiful Jekyll) and I was done.

Now all that’s left is to keep writing.