Cleaning up content for Hugo version of site

Part 4 of Moving from WordPress to Hugo

Adding the unmodified content to Hugo site

Adopting the export process documented in part 3 yielded an exported data structure with all of the exported posts (of all types) in one folder.

I copied the contents of this folder into /content/post folder and ran hugo server -D.

There were a few (<1%) errors due to malformed YAML in front matter where the posts had been imported to WrodPress from an external RSS feed, but after correcting those the site built correctly (but with wrong metadata on posts).

Examining the exported WordPress data

The front matter in the exported content varied depending on data type:

Posts

---
title: Only Humans
author: Julian
type: post
date: 2017-02-13T12:28:57+00:00
url: /2017/02/13/only-humans/

---

Notes (custom type syn_worknote)

---
title: Interesting uses of Linux “find” command
author: Julian
type: syn_worknote
date: 2019-05-31T08:36:37+00:00
url: /worknotes/interesting-uses-of-linux-find-command/

---

Goals of content cleanup

• reinstate the split between normal posts and working notes
  (because I use them for different things)
  • change the type of working notes to note
  • selectively move the notes to the correct Hugo folder /content/post/
• change the author tag to match the Academic theme and the author I had set up on the new site
• change the hard-coded urls to aliases (so I can put a new url scheme on this site but still serve requests to the old URLS )
• extract the last part of the hard-coded url into post slug to give me more flexibility in devising the url scheme for this site

Tools

Although I work on a Windows machine locally, I did this work using the Git bash shell to give me access to unix text and file manipulation.

All commands run from inside the /content directory unless otherwise noted.

Reinstate the split between normal posts and working notes

find . -name "*.md" -exec sed -i 's|syn_worknote|note|g' {} \;
grep -iRl "type: note" ./post | while read f; do mv "$f" note; done

Change author tags

find . -name "*.md" -exec sed -i 's|author: Julian|authors: [\"synesthesia\"]|g' {} \; 

Remove url tag, create slug and aliases

Posts

find ./post -type f -exec sed  -i -E  -e "s/url: \/([[:digit:]]*\/[[:digit:]]*\/[[:digit:]]*\/)([a-zA-Z0-9\-]*)/slug: \2 \naliases: [\"\/\1\2\"]" {} \;
find ./post -type f -exec sed  -i -E  -e "s/]\//]" {} \; 

Notes

find ./note -type f -exec sed  -i -E  -e "s/url: (\/worknotes\/)([a-zA-Z0-9\-]*)/slug: \2 \naliases: [\"\1\2\"]/" {} \; 
find ./note -type f -exec sed  -i -E  -e "s/]\//]/" {} \; 

Example metadata after changes

Posts

---
title: Only Humans
authors: ["synesthesia"]
type: post
date: 2017-02-13T12:28:57+00:00
slug: only-humans 
aliases: ["/2017/02/13/only-humans"]
---

Notes

---
title: Interesting uses of Linux "find" command
authors: ["synesthesia"]
type: note
date: 2019-05-31T08:36:37+00:00
slug: interesting-uses-of-linux-find-command 
aliases: ["/worknotes/interesting-uses-of-linux-find-command"]
---

Setup new permalink structure

To create the desired permalink structure, edit /config/_default/config.toml:

[permalinks]
  post = "/:year/:month/:day/:slug/"
  note = "/note/:year/:month/:day/:slug/"