[conspire] migrate off WordPress (WP)

[Michael Paoli]

> From: "Deirdre Saoirse Moen" <deirdre at deirdre.net>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Acronym expansion, taking pity on the general reader
> Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2020 02:39:50 -0700

> Apologies for not getting back to the email. I had been meaning to,  
> but I have been trying to move my site and have discovered that, to  
> my horror, WordPress “upgraded” the “save as plain text” Markdown  
> entries I’d been carefully generating for years so I could migrate  
> off WP if I wanted to (and I do). (For Deirdre.net, which is  
> currently offline pending my finishing the migration, among others)
>
> See: https://twitter.com/deirdresm/status/1297307526057222144

Hmmm, is that off of / from WordPress.com hosted, or self-hosted
WordPress?
And ... to ... self-hosted WordPress, or something non-WordPress?

And ... not that I'm an expert at it ...  but did (with some fair
bit of planning and testing, etc.) manage to migrate from
WordPress.com hosted, to self-hosted (presently on
Debian's current stable).  Most notably that's what was, and is
BerkeleyLUG's site: https://berkeleylug.com/

That was some moderate(ish) while back, but if any of that might be
of use/interest, did write up a fair bit of going through the process
and testing it out and working it out, and going through the
actual cut-over.

Also, if one wants to go from WordPress.com hosted to something
non-WordPress, self-hosted, and on a reasonably stable
platform (e.g. Debian's stable), could also potentially be a
useful interim step.

Anyway, much detail of BerkeleyLUG's migration process off of
WordPress.com (to self-hosted) can be found here:
https://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki/doku.php?id=berkeleylug:digital_resources
... hmmm, not all that long ago - was bit over a year ago.
And, it being wiki - evolved over time - the WordPress.com
migration (to self-hosted) mostly ended up on that wiki page
as a well evolved/tested fairly detailed outline of the whole
process ... and probably mostly also continued to get updates
regarding some minor relevant tweaks after the migration.
... though some of the (much) later bits (like anti-spam for
comments on WordPress, etc.) were covered later, mostly on
BerkeleyLUG's (Google Groups hosted) list.
There's other stuff on that wiki page too, but a quite large chunk
of it is migrating off of WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress.
Also, a fair bit of the other stuff on that wiki page
overlaps some at least partially relevant context, e.g.
DNS, robots.txt, TLS(/"SSL") certs, etc.

And yes, one of the often annoying things with many services hosted
in cloud, is many of them are often atop platform that's ever changing
beneath one's feet.  That can be highly annoying - not only the level
and frequency of change, but many of those changes don't at all
make things better - and often too break what was earlier working
perfectly fine before.  Much of it is often driven by (among
other things) chasing the "look and feel of" - well, "they" want to look
like all those other newest slickest platforms ... even if they're not
at all the best design for functionality or usability.

One such example that jumps to mind - Atlassian.
Do Jira and/or Confluence upon that - and the sands will be
forever shifting beneath one's feet.  Much of what they consider
"improved", I highly disagree with.  Some random examples (and
probably applies to a whole helluva lot of site):
o replace nice simple clear text labeled links of actions with
   small cryptic icons that one doesn't know what they do - or even notice
   they're things to be clicked on to do stuff, rather than just "pretty"
   decorations (or crud cluttering up valuable screen real estate),
   oh, and can't hover mouse over them to see the URL link to
   reasonably infer/guess what they do ... 'cause now they're all bloody
   JavaScript actions and one has no idea what they do until they're
   clicked upon.  I may, okay, I get it - cryptic icon doesn't have to
   be translated to thousands or more languages around the world - no,
   instead you shift the burden to billions on the planet - you expect
   everyone else to learn what your cryptic icon does.
o I could give nice full descriptions of some items - one could hover
   pointer over 'em, and see the full descriptions - likewise they'd
   also have much shorter more cryptic abbreviations/names - allowing
   one to easily get a lot of them in small bit of screen space ... and
   any unfamiliar - hover pointer over and nice human readable description.
   Well, one of Atlassian's forced upgrades, those nice human readable
   descriptions are now only visible one place ... one has to have access
   to go in and reconfigure them - then one can see them ... no other
   place are they visible at all now ... and most notably one can't see
   them at all where one would use 'em.  Ugh.  Anyway, lots and lots of
   such bone-headed changes.  And yes, I've complained to 'em plenty
   about such, even filed bugs ... but, nope, not a priority for them,
   they're more about whizz-bang flashy shiny new(est) fad - like they're
   trying to make a promotional sales brochure, rather than a highly
   functional and highly useful web site.  Ugh.
o Heck, even from moons ago (about >7 years ago), I remember dealing
   with Confluence - and though was never my favorite/preferred wiki(ish)
   platform, one could always also edit content in markdown mode ...
   which was also often highly handy for bulk edits/"import" ...
   take content out in that format (or create such new - possibly at
   rather large scale and programmatically), then (re)insert such content,
   suitably edited/generated in the appropriate markdown format, load
   into page in markdown format, save, done - e.g. highly handy for
   large scale editing of, say a table, in Confluence's format.
   Well, much to my disappointment that capability has been gone for
   year(s) - if it was ever even there - nowhere to be found on their
   cloudy goop.  So Confluence is pretty good at sucking table data in,
   e.g. from Excel ... but trying to get lots of table data back out from
   Confluence in any particularly usable form or that can be reasonably
   imported into anything else (or even as CSV or the like), and one is
   generally relatively screwed (I've found some 3rd party browser plug-ins
   that let one more-or-less get data out in CSV form ... but that's only
   a partial solution).  So, trying to get such in at scale, get it out
   at even moderate (page/table) scale, bulk edit, and get it back
   in ... forget it.  Not a scalable platform - mostly lots of
   ewey GUI clicky ooh pretty, shiny ... but not so much on functionality.

Anyway, Cloud can be great ... it can also be a nasty foggy drizzly
damp cold wet prison.

> WP fucking HTML/XMLified supposed text entries in a way that can’t  
> easily be undone without a fucking JavaScript app to unfuxxor it,  
> and that broke another app I contribute to (that has a Node app as a  
> feeder piece).

Wish I could say that surprises me.

> Worse, the entire database historically was upgraded, and far enough  
> back there’s just no point in trying to dig back that far.
>
> Anyhow, I have the data, but I’ve been focused on a wee install  
> problem. At least I got all the Debian upgrades done. \o/

Yeah Debian!  :-)