It seems like there has been a downfall for blogs as people have decided to use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to host their thoughts and ideas. However, I think it is really important to own your own data. I don’t blog a lot (as you can probably tell). I also don’t share a lot online. I haven’t posted to Twitter in a long time, and I hardly ever log in to Facebook or any other social media site.

I wanted to change this site to more of a portfolio than just a blog. So, Blogger (even though it supports pages) didn’t seem like the best solution for a portfolio site. I always knew about GitHub pages and even considered using it when I switched from Wordpress to Blogger.

I made the switch to GitHub Pages. I won’t do a big how-to post. I will just tell you to search for “Jekyll GitHub Pages”. There are plenty of guides. Since I am in academics, I decided to use the Al-Folio theme. You can also look into the Academic Pages theme.

I didn’t find a good solution to importing all of my old blog posts from Blogger. So, I just went to my old blog and copied and pasted the content into a markdown file (.md). It took me some time to get all of the links back, but I didn’t have to do much to edit the markdown. I just needed to find the headings and make them headings again by putting hashtags in (#).

As for the comments, I only have a few and they don’t add a lot to the content. So, this isn’t a good solution for people with large blogs with a lot of posts and comments. However, I am sure there is a way to export comments from Blogger and import them into whatever you decide to use for your comment engine.

For now, I will not have comments. I don’t want to use discourse, disqus or any other outside provider for comments. I will look into Staticman when I get the chance. Sorry to anyone who commented on my previous blog. If you feel like your comment needs to be preserved, let me know. I can either add it to the bottom, or add it if I get Staticman installed.