# 2017-07-13

For a university project I had set up a wordpress blog, some years ago.
It is clear that there will be no new content to the blog. 

Wordpress is such a popular software that there are new security issues
found from time to time. Hence running a Wordpress instance comes with
operational responsibilities of keeping the software and the plugins up
to date. This is always a hassle, there are so many cross-dependencies
(to PHP e.g.), that one update will eventually break something (since
these projects don't care about backwards compatibility).

Hence I decided to replace the Wordpress instance with a mirrored copy
of static HTML files. This way the content will still be available and
the design will still be the same. It will still look like a Wordpress
instance, but it is actually just static files.

There were some issues, but in the end I did it this way:

1) I made sure Wordpress does no longer export shortlinks. Otherwise you
will have a lot of "index.html?p=123" files in your mirrored copy. I
followed this guide [1], which is pretty simple. You just add a simple
file to the plugins folder and activate it in the GUI.

2) I deactivated comments, so that the input form for comments and the
"Leave a reply" links are no longer displayed:

	Settings > Discussion
	Automatically close comments on articles older than  1 days 

3) Then I did:

	wget --mirror 		 \
    	     --convert-links 	 \
	     --adjust-extension  \
	     --force-directories \
	     --page-requisites   \
	     --no-parent 	 \
	     http://sixthsense.creal.de

4) Then I could switch the nginx config:

	#root   /home/michi/www/sixthsense/wordpress/;
	root    /home/michi/www/sixthsense/sixthsense.creal.de/

[1] http://www.douglasradburn.co.uk/how-to-remove-shortlink-in-wordpress/