Content Here Republished on Pelican
I have been steadily reducing my Google footprint over the past year. I switched from gmail. I no longer use Google drive or photos. And, most recently, I migrated this blog from Blogger to a statically generated site hosted on Amazon S3.
I use a framework called Pelican to generate the full site from content files written in Markdown. I am writing this post using a Markdown editor called Typora, although most text editors have very good Markdown support. Then I run a command that generates HTML files and pushes them to S3.
Migration was incredibly easy. Google Takeout allows you to export all your posts as an Atom file. Then I wrote a script that turned the Atom feed into Markdown files. It was easy to keep the same URLs thanks to the "blogger:filename" elements in the Atom file. For a template, I chose a theme called Blue Penguin. After changing a couple of colors, I was done!
I am still working out the finer points of the workflow. So far, the main limitation I see is that I can't post from any computer like I was able to do with Blogger (and before that Wordpress). Before being able to generate the site, you need to set up a local environment -- not hard thanks to GitHub and Pipenv, but not something that I would want to do on my work computer. Probably the next time I get inspired to blog while traveling, I will email myself a post to publish later.
Overall, I am pretty happy with this setup!