Migration from BlogSpot to GitHub Pages

 As convenient as blogger.com marginally is... I've decided enough is enough with the wonky editing, complete lack of integrated source control, and always that little bit of nagging wonder if one day google will just pull the plug and decommission it.

It was several years ago I tried to migrate to my GitHub Pages site at gojimmypi.github.io. Although I consider myself rather persistent, I ended up giving up at the time due to unreconcilable issues with Jekyll. (which admittedly were not supposed to be supported in Windows, and WSL was still somewhat new).

Fast forward a few years and WOW! My Jekyll install experience was nearly trouble free.

So ok, once Jekyll is working, there's still the tiny little issue of templates. I found one I liked from jekyllthemes.io, specifically the gridster-jekyll-theme. Alas nothing is ever as easy as it is supposed to be. Of course, if it is too easy, it is no fun, eh? So the issue with this particular theme, is not only that it is old, but there are a few quirky things that need to be fixed. There are literally hundreds of forks. Which one might be of interest?

How about looking at which fork has the most likes? Unfortunately, there's no such feature on GutHub, but stackoverflow to the rescue once again. There was only one answer to the question "How to find the best changes from downstream Github forks?" and it didn't sound promising with the comment "It's 3 years old, I can't seem to get it working, but someone could fork it" - but find_forks does work!

cd /mnt/c/workspace/
git clone https://github.com/elimohl/find_forks.git                             
cd find_forks
pip3 install tqdm 
pip3 install pygithub
./find_forks.py DigitalMindCH/gridster-jekyll-theme

It should output something list this:

# usage: find_forks.py [-h] [-u USERNAME] [-p [PASSWORD]] [-s SLEEP_INTERVAL] repo_name
0 $  ./find_forks.py DigitalMindCH/gridster-jekyll-theme
 95%|| 197/208 [02:23 00:08,  1.37it/s]Forks   Stars
https://github.com/pcesar65/renameme    1
https://github.com/tomer-ben-david/techblog     1
https://github.com/cristinafsanz/paintings      1
https://github.com/zirkc/appworms       0
https://github.com/bullwinkle-org/gridster-jekyll-theme 0
https://github.com/jfcorugedo/jfcorugedo.github.io      0
https://github.com/tanaphum/gridster-jekyll-theme       0
https://github.com/librarywon/librarywon.github.io      0
...

There's also brute-force method to call the GitHub API:

curl https://api.github.com/repos/DigitalMindCH/gridster-jekyll-theme/forks?sort=watchers

But that's only so useful.

So what about the most changes in a fork? I found forkizard, but nothing happened after the scan. I noticed an open issue and fortunately a PR to fix it! So the one to use is at the trufanov-nok/forkizard fork. I also created my own fork, just in case it ever gets deleted, as this could be really handy again in the future. It works really quite well:

# The source code is in Go. After this operation, 324 MB of additional disk space will be used:
sudo apt-get install golang-go

git clone https://github.com/trufanov-nok/forkizard.git
go build

Run it like this:

0 $  ./forkizard "DigitalMindCH/gridster-jekyll-theme"
2021/03/21 13:14:55 208 forks
 208 / 208 [============================================================] 100.00% 1m26s
done
/AwarenessOverload/AwarenessOverload              +388 -0
/vikasksrivastava/gridster-jekyll-theme           +293 -0
/BrunnaRosa/BrunnaRosa                            +227 -0
/ickc/gridster-jekyll-theme                       +138 -0
/NNUP/nnup.github.io                              +92 -0
/cett/cett.github.io                              +68 -0
/samyak45/Gridster                                +66 -0
/UntrustableRus/gridster-jekyll-theme             +53 -0
/guriosam/ajudamaceio                             +43 -0
/thiagohersan-jekyll/gridster-jekyll-theme-simple +43 -0

I ended up choosing the ickc/gridster-jekyll-theme with a demo at ickc.github.io/gridster-jekyll-theme (my fork is located here) I have it installed to a subdirectory in my GitHub.io page like this:

cd /mnt/c/workspace/gojimmypi.github.io

# the repo is over 200MB in size!
git clone https://github.com/gojimmypi/gridster-jekyll-theme.git --depth 1

cd gridster-jekyll-theme
bundle install
bundle update github-pages
bundle exec jekyll serve

The author was also kind in digging up the documentation from the wayback machine, and included it as part of the theme.

Now to migrate pages...