A fresh new Full Pipe Umbrella

Welcome to the fresh new "Full Pipe Umbrella" website.

This new blog is intended to keep a diary (up to date... hopefully) of my activities and projects which spans several different disciplines: ICT science, visual arts (both digital and traditional), CGI and music.

From left: Moka Lazair concept art (support character in my upcoming indipendent webcomic "The importance of beeing alien"); my custom test scene for Blender Cycles materials; a shell 3D model reconstructed from uncalibrated photos with Regard3D and rendered with Blender Cycles

I am a very picky person

... and it can reveal to be blocking sometime.

I built the previous website using WordPress. But the Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg CMS never met my expectations and became cause of frustration and years of inactivity. Meanwhile I obsessively designed and redesigned the site. After testing numerous themes I fell back to the Twenty Twenty theme that is consistent, at least, but provides a terrible design.

I even tried a version based on underscore starter theme but, even if I got some interesting results and it has been a good playground to improve my skills with WordPress, PHP and other technologies involved, I soon realized that this approach would have taken too much time to obtain an appreciable result.

I needed a quick solution: very quick! After all what I wanted to do was just writing articles and eventually create a portfolio gallery.

Then it came the React era. And I finally found Gatsby.

Technical stuff: migrating from WordPress to Gatsby

Despite Gatsby was clearly the final solution given I am a front end developer very familiar with JavaScript and React there were still some problems to solve.

The most important one was: how to batch convert all my articles from WordPress, Blogger (and others) formats to Gatsby compatible MarkDown?

The solution I picked is the one described by Tania Rascia in her article The End of an Era: Migrating from WordPress to Gatsby (but you can also read Seth Corker's Move from Blogger to Gatsby).

To automate the process Tania used Exitwp a Python script able to read a WordPress XML export and output MarkDown files with their related resources.

Unfortunately Exitwp is quite an old piece of code and does not support Python 3 also I wanted to automatically download all the images associated to the articles. Therefore I forked Exitwp in my repository https://github.com/endersaka/exitwp and made the necessary modifications and extensively refactored the code to make it more maintainable. Images download is based on another fork: Exitwp3.

Wish a bright future for Full Pipe Umbrella blog

Now that I am much more satisfied with my new blog I hope to write more and more interesting articles about the art and the tech that are part of my every day life.