I recently migrated this site from Hashnode to GitHub Pages, and I'm really getting into the flexibility and control that managing the content through Jekyll provides. So, naturally, after finalizing the move I got to work recreating Hashnode's "Series" feature, which lets you group posts together and highlight them as a collection. One of the things I liked about the Series setup was that I could control the order of the collected posts: my posts about building out the vRA environment in my homelab are probably best consumed in chronological order (oldest to newest) since the newer posts build upon the groundwork laid by the older ones, while posts about my other one-off projects could really be enjoyed in any order.

After a bit less than a year of hosting my little technical blog with Hashnode↗, I spent a few days migrating the content over to a new format hosted with GitHub Pages↗.

So long, Hashnode

Hashnode served me well for the most part, but it was never really a great fit for me. Hashnode's focus is on developer content, and I'm not really a developer; I'm a sysadmin who occasionally develops solutions to solve my needs, but the code is never the end goal for me. As a result, I didn't spend much time in the (large and extremely active) community associated with Hashnode. It's a perfectly adequate blogging platform apart from the community, but it's really built to prop up that community aspect and I found that to be a bit limiting - particularly once Hashnode stopped letting you create tags to be used within your blog and instead only allowed you to choose from the tags↗ already popular in the community. There are hundreds of tags for different coding languages, but not any that would cover the infrastructure virtualization or other technical projects that I tend to write about.

I'm preparing to migrate this blog thingy from Hashnode (which has been great!) to a GitHub Pages site with Jekyll↗ so that I can write posts locally and then just do a git push to publish them - and get some more practice using git in the process. Of course, I've written some admittedly-great content here and I don't want to abandon that.

Hashnode helpfully automatically backs up my posts in Markdown format to a private GitHub repo so it was easy to clone those into a local working directory, but all the embedded images were still hosted on Hashnode: