Resurrected my standalone blog for the third time, this time again on Octopress and still on 2.0 version. I didn’t intend to do this but there is still no good blogging platform with code highlighting support.

I set it up pretty quickly but the first problem was that I wanted to keep old content but I didn’t have source code for it anymore. Converting by hand seemed tedious so I thought about hiring someone on oDesk but then, after a few Google searches I found a tool to convert HTML back to markdown — reverse_markdown ruby gem. At first attempt it did no conversion but after stripping all HTML code around actual post content (the most important is to remove article tags around) it produced nice markdown which I put back into Octopress.

After initial import I did some cleanup — removed unnecessary /blog prefix from post permalinks, fixed links in old content pointing to my old-old MovableType blog and imported static files into Octopress. To check all links I installed link-checker ruby gem — it works pretty fine but seems to be having problems with some https:// links.

Once all content was in good shape I tweaked CSS colors back to my old palette, added Stack Exchange badge, enabled Disqus comments, updated Google Analytics JavaScript to latest universal code.

After comparing generated HTML with old blog using diff I have found a bug in Octopress: canonical link for categories pages is broken by default — has missing /, see Octopress issue #949 for fix. Once I was satisfied with content I deployed it to server using rsync.

There is currently Octopress version 3.0 in development and it is close to final release but it seems to be quite different from version 2.0 in its concept and as its author says:

For those currently using Octopress, it will be a while before the new releases can compete with the features of the old version.