Category Archives: Blogging

Export Your Markdown Posts from Jekyll to Ghost

Want to export your Markdown posts from Jekyll to a format that can be easily imported into Ghost, now that the new blogging platform has launched? By reverse-engineering the plugin the Ghost developers made for WordPress, I put together a Jekyll plugin that generates a JSON file that follows the same format. (This was all done in advance of the public release, so it’s untested super-beta software. Hopefully it will work for you without issue!)

  1. Clone the repo and drop the jekylltoghost.rb file into your Jekyll site’s _plugins directory.
  2. Run jekyll build.
  3. There should now be a ghost_export.json file in your _site directory, which you can copy and import into Ghost.

To import the JSON file, you just need to visit http://example.org/ghost/debug/ in your browser and look for the Import section.

Of course, this plugin is fairly limited. Both because of the simplistic nature of the original WordPress plugin I used as a guide, and because Ghost itself is brand-new and has many unimplemented features. This is pretty much just the posts, tags/categories and standard YAML front matter. Enough to get your words into Ghost, with the same permalinks and publication dates. Images will have to be dealt with manually, at least for the time being. (Basically, you just need to copy them from your Jekyll site to the appropriate folder in your Ghost installation and manually fix the paths in the posts.) But, hey, it’s open source. Fork it and hack away!

Jekyll-to-Ghost Exporter [GitHub]

Ghost: The New Blogging Platform, and Why it Matters

Ghost is a new blogging platform that aims to do one thing and do it well: blogging. Its developers want to recapture the spirit of blogging that was present in the earlier days, when it was all about writing and publishing long-form content. A…

Jekyll Themes

I’ve recently started using Jekyll for one of my blogs recently, and while it’s a solid blog engine, there’s one thing its small community lacks. Themes. While I like to roll my own themes, some people want a drop-in option so they can start…

Don’t Link to Aggregators

When someone submits a post from Boing Boing to Reddit, one of the first comments to appear is usually complaining of “blogspam.” This term, though sometimes used unfairly, is intended to deride a blog post that only contains a brief summary or quotation to…

Full Circle: The Return of Static Blog Generators

WordPress is the most popular blogging software today, powering a majority of the top one hundred blogs. Like many of the systems that are popular nowadays, it’s dynamic. The server pieces together pages on the fly when they are requested, pulling content from the…

Disabling Comments on Old Posts, or How to Kill Discussion

With spam comments on the rise, it’s becoming more common of a practice for bloggers to disable commenting on older posts. (WordPress even provides an option to disable comments on posts older than x days.) This drastically cuts down on the spam, as spammers…

Learning Curve: It isn’t What You Think it is

How many times have you heard the phrase “it has a steep learning curve” in reference to something that is supposed to be difficult? This commonly-used phrase sounds good, but isn’t really logical. Because it’s wrong. A “learning curve” is a visual device used…

BlogBuzz August 20, 2011

Leaked AT&T Letter Demolishes Case For T-Mobile Merger HTML5 Boilerplate 2.0 is now available Object-Oriented PHP: Autoloading, Serializing, and Querying Objects Persistent Headers Google, needing patents, buys Motorola wireless for $12.5 billion Building a Jabber Client for iOS: Interface Setup Creating Reusable & Versatile…

Blogging Tip: Keep a File of Post Ideas

What am I going to write today? I have asked myself that question countless times. You too have probably spent hours trying to think up a concept for a post on your blog. Inspiration comes and goes. It’s the curse of the writer. Even…

NaNoWriMo 2010 is Almost Here

It’s almost November, which means this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is almost upon us. Participants have 30 days to write 50,000 words. Sound like fun? Seeing as many of you are bloggers, it’s not too great a leap to assume that some…