I got a message a few months back that Microsoft was deprecating the MySQL server version that I was using in Azure. The cost was going up, and while I don’t mind donating the $12-15/month to the site, I didn’t want this to be really expensive.
It’s also a perfect fit for a static site as the content rarely changes and doesn’t really need to have database access to server pages. Jekyll, which powers a number of others sites (SQL Saturday, SQL Memorial) seemed like a good fit.
This covers a few of the things I did to move the site, which was surprisingly easier than I expected.
Exporting the Data
There is a plugin on the WordPress marketplace that you can add to your site to export your data as markdown for jekyll. I tried to add it to the live site, but the plugin didn’t want to activate. My PHP was old.
I could upgrade PHP, but I might break something, and ultimately, I don’t need another job.
Instead I decided to move the site local. That’s easy with a container, and I found this post on running WP in a container. In a couple of minutes after getting the Docker image downloaded, I had a new WP site running on my laptop. With the latest PHP and WP versions.
While the image was downloaded, I used the main WP export to download a copy of data.
The next step was to import this locally. Since I had a brand new WP site in a container, the easiest thing is an import, rather than a database restore. I’m a database pro, but I prefer simple and efficient processes.
I picked the export file and let it run.
Once I ran the import, I could see the same site in my local container as I see at tsqltuesday.com. Now I need a plugin. When I searched around, the Jekyll exporter was recommended, but I couldn’t install this on older version or WP.
However, in my container, this worked fine.
Once the plugin was installed. I could see it in my list.
I also had a new menu item under my Tools, which was export to Jekyll. Once
Once I picked this, I got a file to download (from the container to my local drive), and all of my files were zipped up.
Inside of this file, I had a bunch of folders, which were structured for Jekyll. The _posts is the main folder where the various posts from your WP site are stored. As you see here, all the files are .md, which are markdown files. The _posts are the same format.
Now that we have a set of Jekyll compatible files, let’s get this moving to GitHub.
Loading into Git
The first step was to create a repository on GitHub. I’m moving this to the SQL Saturday organization, so it can be a part of the charitable foundation (and I can hand it to someone at some point).
I created the repo and then downloaded an empty repo to my local drive. If you want to help improve the site or change things, fork this repo and then you can have your own URL.
I then copied my exported structure into this folder, but I had some issues rendering with the default GitHub themes. So I deleted everything and then grabbed a fork of Beautiful Jekyll, which is the same theme running the SQL Saturday site. Essentially I copied all of the Beautiful Jekyll files to this local repo, then copied the T-SQL Tuesday export on top of those files and committed the files.
In GitHub, I also added the automation for Actions by grabbing the workflows folder and added that. In the pages setup, I then enabled pages, which gave me a .github.io URL, which is fine for testing.
This worked, as once I committed code, I saw a build.
And it worked well.
Sort of. The theme stuff didn’t quite work well, so I ended up copying over the SQL Sat site with the Beautiful Jekyll theme and then deleted posts and added back the T-SQL code.
I had some work to get the site working well, and when I did, I moved it. I created an official repo here where people can send PRs if needed: https://github.com/sqlsaturday/tsqltuesday
Once I had things here, I had a little DNS work to do for the custom domain, but T-SQL Tuesday was again live at https://tsqltuesday.com/
And with an SSL cert, thanks to GitHub. However, I wasn’t done.
Data Cleanup
While I was hoping the plugin would convert things easily, I realized quickly there were a bunch of problems. Not a crazy number, but some.
The data cleanup was a manual process. I could perhaps have found a way to parse and automate this, but with 174 invites, this just wasn’t enough work for me to spend time building and testing something. Plus, I needed to get this done before the next month.
First, I had a bunch of posts converted with long WordPress like URLs. That’s fine, but I had inconsistency as some posts weren’t linked in this way. I also had some links that were absolute, using the https://tsqltuesday.azurewebsites.net/ URL as a base.
I decided to simplify things.
First, I added a permalink to each page, similar to what you see in this one: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sqlsaturday/tsqltuesday/refs/heads/main/_posts/2009-12-01-t-sql-tuesday-001-datetime-tricks.md
I set this to be /xxx, where xxx is the invite number. While this might be a problem if we get to 1000, I certainly won’t be dealing with that one.
Next, some links were absolute and pointing to the old site, which was on Azure. I changed these, mostly in the Host Index, to relative links using a simple formula for the posts, which was a /xxx, where xxx is the invite number. This is a simple, clean way of managing the links.
Lastly, I had issues with some individual posts, where I’d see things like this:
That HTML wasn’t rendering inside the markdown correctly, so I had to delete these items. And, of course, the end tags.
I also had issues where people would do something like Steve (twitter | blog) and the pipe character was seen as a table indicator. I had to change those to /.
Savings
The old costs, which usually came out of my MVP subscription, were about $12/mo for the db and $9 for the site. The requirement to move to a Flex server increased the db to about $23/mo.
The new Github site costs $0. Perfect for a charitable endeavor.