Moved the site over to Pure Blog
Switched over realdeserts.com to use Pure Blog, a simple PHP based blogging platform by Kev Quirk. It's great!
I'd been looking for an excuse to try out a simpler site platform for running sites that have very simple needs.
Around here I mostly use the site for sharing out quick music links and such. (The kind of stuff I'd otherwise spam the group chat with lol.)
On WP, I kept wanting a quicker way to share out blog posts. Could get the app, but nah.
With Pure Blog, I can write / share to a markdown app (Obsidian currently), then sync / upload (Secure Shellfish currently, and or possibly Working Copy in the future) to post it. Plus I get a future-proof backup for free. Pure Blog should work great for all that. I'm happy.
Converting old posts was a small chore, so I'll just share what worked for me.
Tried https://swizec.com/blog/how-to-export-a-large-wordpress-site-to-markdown/ and that one didn't work for some reason. I forget why? Some weird node error. Then got it working but it didn't have the right post data, and I couldn't figure out how to customize it, so I bailed.
Went with https://github.com/lonekorean/wordpress-export-to-markdown and here's what worked for me:
$ npx wordpress-export-to-markdown --input=export.xml --frontmatter-fields=title,slug,date --post-folders=false --prefix-date=true --date-folders=none --save-images=allMostly fine. Here's how it turned out, as an example:
---
title: This should really be the default Novation Bass Station design
slug: this-should-really-be-the-default-novation-bass-station-design
date: 2026-02-24
status: published
---
[https://handprinted.co.uk/blogs/blog/meet-the-maker-ian-swifty-swift](https://handprinted.co.uk/blogs/blog/meet-the-maker-ian-swifty-swift)A few issues though.
Issue #1: Quoted Titles and Slugs
Post titles and slugs are enclosed in quotes. Aside from finger flaunting your titles, this causes issues with and or possibly breaks links, so you need to change the following to remove the double quotes:
# wordpress-export-to-markdown-master/src/writer.js
# line 81:
outputValue = value.reduce((list, item) => `${list}\n - ${item}`, '');
# line 103:
outputValue = `${escapedValue}`;Issue #2: Unpublished Posts
Then, to get posts to show up once imported, you have to publish them. But lonekorean/wordpress-export-to-markdown exports this as draft: true when a post is draft, whereas Pure Blog expects status: published when a post is published. Cool, cool.
You can do a find and replace to set posts to published. There's probably a better way to do this, but this is a quick solution that worked for me.
Find:
---
Replace:
status: published
---
Issue #3: Image Paths
Finally, in Pure Blog, images are stored in the content/images folder, so you can update that.
Find:
(images/Replace:
(content/images/I think that's it
Thanks Kev for making Pure Blog!
Hope this helps someone in the future, quite possibly myself.
