So, micro.blog is awesome. As far as “what would you recommend to someone who wants to start a blog and keep it very ’low key’ for real” — micro.blog.
You get some podcast hosting, great integration with the fediverse and bluesky and even (ugh) threads. It’s all good.
What’s not good is that it sometimes takes 20 seconds to post what is essentially a tweet. And that just didn’t work for me.

Now, micro.blog is just a hugo blog with a bunch of back-end stuff (all the integrations). And I’ve had a Hugo blog before! So how hard can it be to just transfer all my posts from micro.blog to my own little github-hosted cloudflare-operated static website?

Going from micro.blog to Hugo is hard

Ugh. So hard.

HTML formatting

Turns out, there’s hella built-in HTML when you do an export from micro.blog. And that’s kinda a bitch to get rid of.
With some help from Sublime Text and lots of googling of regular expression (I’m a lowly copywriter, not a fancy programming person), I was able to do a “find-replace” to kill all the HTML in the markdown files.
Did it break something in my old posts? Scroll through my blog to find out.
All I know that I was able to get rid of the HTML tags.

I used this to remove in-line blocks:

</?[^>]+>

And this to remove HTML blocks:

<[^>]+>[\s\S]*?<\/[^>]+>

So yeah. Find that and replace it with nothing. And that did the trick.

SO MUCH FRONT MATTER

micro.blog adds a lot of extra front matter. From permalinks to posts to weird date stamps (both creation date and latest modification date).
To remove those I basically used:

^[FRONTMATER CATEGORY OF WHAT NEEDS TO BE REMOVED]: .+\n?

and replaced it with nothing.

The good: It got rid of everything I didn’t need.
The bad: It took a while because there’s a lot of different kinds of tags and front matter, so I had to go manually through all of the different properties. There are probably still some random variables hanging around, but none that would prevent me from building the Hugo site locally.

Titles

micro.blog is a microblogging platform (duh!). But what that means is that none of the “tweet-like” posts have titles. I had to go through all the posts without titles and add titles manually.
This was a lot of busy work and 100% the reason why all my post titles are lame right now.
Will I ever go back and change them? Unlikely.
What is likely is that I’ll just delete some of the more… useless posts in my archive.

The Archive

Just doesn’t work. Hence why you don’t see an “Archive” button at the top of my site. Just the “About” and the “Now”.
I’ll figure this one later.

Folder Structure

Because there are no titles, all the posts generated by micro.blog are placed in folders based on their creation date. Hugo doesn’t like that. So I just took all those folders, put them in a “Posts” folder, and called it a day.
Will it make going through old posts to delete them a chore? Absolutely.
Was it a “quick fix” for my problem? Also yes.

The Actual Micro.Blog Export

Oh yeah, did I mention that just running

hugo build

on the micro.blog export didn’t work?
Because it didn’t work.

What I had to do was create a brand new website using

hugo new site blog

Then install all the themes and set up a config file from scratch.
And then I copied my “content/posts” folder and hope that everything works.

It did. Though there were some micro-adjustments I had to tinker around with later, but that’s basically the gist of it.

Would I do it Again?

No.

Does that change whether I’d recommend micro.blog

No. It’s lowkey awesome. Not $5/month type of awesome for me personally, but it sure beats WordPress if you just want to share some short thoughts on a platform that isn’t destroying the world (yet).

P.S.

I don’t know if RSS works :D But I’m so done with all this for today.