Easy Blog Migration From Medium To Your Own Site Using Python

·3 min read

Recently I migrated my existing articles from Medium to my own new website (https://jerrychi.com) in a quick, low-code way. I wanted to have both blog articles and permanent pages (e.g. “About Me” page) and high customizability while spending minimal effort and money.

You can do this too! Here’s how:

Register a domain name. I used https://domains.google/ to register jerrychi.com, paying about $12 per year. This is the only thing I’m paying for.

Install required Python libraries including Pelican (the Python-based static site generator for creating personal blogs/websites) on your local laptop. E.g. pip install -r requirements.txt (see my [requirements.txt](https://github.com/peacej/blog6/blob/main/requirements.txt)). I used Python 3.8.6 in a conda environment but other setups should work too.

Pelican logo

Auto-convert any Medium articles you choose to Markdown files (which are compatible with Pelican, which will then auto-convert them to HTML/Javascript) using the medium_to_markdown tool described at https://willkoehrsen.github.io/writing/markdown/converting-medium-posts-to-markdown-for-your-blog / . I did slightly tweak his code to e.g. filter out a few specific words. This doesn’t require any special access to your Medium account; it’s just scraping the text from the public internet.

Push your code to a new Github repo.

• You can host the website on Github Pages for free, up to 1 GB of storage (nothing beyond that even if you want to pay). If I ever need more than 1 GB, I might migrate to Heroku.
• You can use your own custom domain (in my case jerrychi.com)

We need a master or main git branch for all the code and then a gh-pages branch to store the actual website assets that are served when people visit your site. Thankfully one can just use a tool called ghp-import to automate pushing the only the needed to gh-pages branch. You can see how I use this tool. After pushing to github, usually changes are reflected in a few seconds on my website.

• Tip: style changes to CSS files etc. may require an “empty cache and hard reload” in Chrome to be visually reflected on the website due to caching.

Pelican also supports add-ons, themes, etc.

• See the pelican-themes repo for instructions on themes.
• I chose to use the Flex theme which includes many nifty features such a mobile-first responsive UI. I cloned this Flex repo directly rather than cloning from the pelican-themes repo which pins Flex at an older version.
  • In pelicanconf.py (the main configuration file) I simply set PLUGINS = ["pelican.plugins.search"] and STORK_VERSION = "1.5.0" to enable a search box on the left navigation bar.
• I also edited the pelican-templates/Flex/static/stylesheet/style.less file to customize the font style (my first time dealing with the Less language but it was easy to edit).

That’s it! Now you have a nice shiny new personal website~

So, why did I choose Pelican? I also considered Nikola and Django:

• Nikola: the second-most popular Python static site generator after Pelican. I did initially try building with Nikola but got frustrated with the documentation being a bit unclearly worded and the lack of resources/answers when e.g. googling around for an issue. Pelican is more established and popular with more discussion/answers for potential issues.
• Django: the most popular Python web backend framework. I did take the Django official tutorial, which was enjoyable and extremely well-written. However, Django is much more complicated than Pelican (which is natural since Django is a general-purpose framework for creating any sort of webpage) and I’d likely end up combining Django with a frontend framework like React (meaning one more framework to learn). The complexity and work required was overkill for needs: a simple personal website. I’ll come back to learn Django+React if I need a much fancier site.