Migrating from Jekyll to Publii

My Jekyll workflow used to be:

1. Copy the last post.
2. Update the YAML front matter in the new post.
3. Worry about relevant tags.
4. Write up the shitpost.
5. Build the site via Jekyll.
6. Push the output to Pi since I didn't have any CI/CD pipeline running and optionally, push the source to Codeberg.

My Publii workflow is just write, save and publish. For just a personal blog, I was trying too hard to write and maintain this website with Jekyll. I considered switching to Zola for the longest time but was wary of falling into the same shitty workflow and spending more time adding complexity to a lackluster blog. WordPress would have been a good substitute but I have always liked how light and neat can websites turn out with SSGs. Feature-wise, Publii sits somewhere in the middle of those two extremes where it can generate a lightweight static web-page with a CMS running locally.

There's no easy way to migrate the posts from Jekyll to Publii. I copied the 107 posts manually and created new posts in here. Since Publii only supports WordPress imports, another way would be to go from Jekyll -> WordPress -> Publii. Its extra effort and I am too lazy to even set up redirects so the old URL structure and old feed url are gone with this migration. It did present an opportunity to fix the tags which were all over the place. The price for not maintaining post tags diligently is accumulating lots of tags with very few posts between them. The tag management feature in Publii takes away that pain. Publii has its own quirks but where it really lacks is in the themes department. There are barely 24 Free or Paid themes in their marketplace and search results also don't give much hope. There's no easy way to migrate away from Publii too. All it offers is the static html output. An export to WordPress would be a great feature to add.

I am giving up some flexibility over convenience but its a trade-off I am willing to make to have less friction in maintaining a blog.