Moving My Programming Blog Posts from WordPress to Dev.To

#devto #wordpress #blog

I've been using WordPress for a while now for various blogging purposes. I've started and closed more programming blogs on the platform than I can remember. I've tried self-hosting (never again), I've used their hosted blog system. In any case I was never really satisfied. If I what I blog about is simply my experiences in living in Europe, or something silly like my love of Minecraft, then WordPress is fine. However, when I want to write about what I've learned as a developer, or anything where I need to post code snippets, then WordPress just doesn't work for me. I need a better tool for this. So along came Dev.to. At first I admit I wasn't sure what it was all about. I figured it was just a social media service for developers, which is fine within itself as we always need to network, but then I realized people were posting blogs there. So I started thinking, and after my last post on my WordPress blog I realized that I need to make a move. So I'm beginning to work on moving things from my WordPress.com account to here. This is probably going to take some time but I'm determined that this is where I want to start posting my blogs. So how will I do this? Well let me explain how I have my personal website setup.

My Site

So my personal site I've done as a mostly static webpage, using some bootstrap css and a little jQuery work. The JavaScript part is simply to display my most recent posts from my blog. I accomplished this with the use of WordPress' API. So what will I need to do? I'll need to make this small dynamic portion of my website support the Dev.to API. Honestly that was the deciding factor for this change. Dev.to provides a RESTful API that I can use to request my posts and display links.

Goals

So here is what I'm currently working on for updating my website to work with Dev.to:

Update the icon set to Friconix (Done)
Update the dynamic blog post display
Adding content to Dev.to

As for the last one I'm not sure if I should move all my older posts from WordPress, or if I should just start with new content here. I think if I do move things over I will only move some of the posts that seem relevant. I'll have to really think that over.

I really want to have this all done by the end of the year. I think it is doable even with all the holidays.