Migration on Samarthya

Moving to Hugo, part 2: The migration playbook

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 07:10:00 -0400

Ten phases, in the order that kept my risk low. Each one ends with something you can check, so you always know whether it’s safe to move on.

The numbers come from my own move: 137 WordPress posts from six years, a few hundred images, and a domain that also carried email. Your numbers will differ; the order shouldn’t.

Moving to Hugo, part 1: Why Hugo

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 07:00:00 -0400

After the blog was broken into, I had to decide where it would live next. This is how I made that choice, written so you can reuse the reasoning even if you end up somewhere else.

The story of the break-in is in Rebuilding samarthya.me. This series is the practical companion: why Hugo, how to migrate step by step, and what living with it is like. My own site is the worked example throughout.

Rebuilding samarthya.me, part 2: Salvaging the content

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 12:10:00 -0400

Text is easy to save. Dates, images, code blocks and six years of links are where a migration quietly loses things. Here’s what it took to bring them across.

The raw material
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WordPress can export everything as one XML file (WXR). Together with a database dump and a copy of the uploads folder, that’s the whole site. The export held 139 published posts. Two were the attacker’s, so they were excluded permanently: 137 posts to convert.

Rebuilt on Hugo

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 22:00:00 -0400

A long day, and a good one. The blog is now a static Hugo site: no database, no plugins, nothing to break into. It’s published straight from a git repository.

137 posts converted, and every old link redirects to its new address.
An old backup turned up 126 of the missing images. A handful are still gone for good.
A new homepage that says what this place is for, and topics that sort themselves.

Fall down, get up, build again.

Salvaging six years of posts

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Exported every post from the old site and went through the export carefully. The text survived. Many of the images did not: the server was serving error pages where pictures used to be. Also found a couple of “posts” I never wrote. Those stay out.