A week ago, I wrote :
Sigh, I can’t seem to make up my mind about the platform to host my blog on. You can find my new blog over at <www.riaanhanekom.com>.
Will post the details soon over there. This blog will self-destruct in a week or so.
My first blog was at Blogger , back when Google just bought it. What pained me then, was the lack of control - I couldn’t customize it to do what I wanted it too. After that, I tried Wordpress , where I was happy for some time but the workflow of editing posts in html or via the rich text editor didn’t work out - I realised that I was spending more time formatting posts (images, code, etc.) then writing them.
This drove me to Posterous , where I could write in Markdown , have gist support, and post by email . This helped me to blog more regularly since it lowered the friction in posting considerably. There were some bugs here and there, but nothing too dramatic. Over time, I was more and more convinced that I should move again due to:
- Death by a thousand paper cuts - little features that worked in other blogging platforms were not functional (or plain non-existent) in Posterous.
- The acquisition of Posterous by Twitter puts the platform at risk of stagnating.
- Lack of control (again).
I’ve decided to host my own instance of a blogging platform that I can control. This blog is now running on Octopress , the “blogging framework for hackers”, and I’ve never been happier.
It features :
- Built on Jekyll , the blog aware static site generator. There is nothing dynamic about the content served - these pages have been pre-rendered as static html files. This makes it fast and easy to scale.
- An awesome starter template that looks well on mobile and desktop. Easy to customize, override, and replace.
- Supports Markdown and Textile . Personally I prefer writing in Markdown, but Textile is also a viable alternative to HTML.
- A bunch of plugins , and Liquid templating support.
- A collection of custom Rake tasks to help with previewing, generating and creating content.
Revision control support comes out of the box with git once you clone the Octopress repository . This is useful in versioning and restoring posts (and the entire site, including styles and plugins), but also serves as a backup in case of emergency .
For writing posts, I now have a much more minimalistic toolset. I use Vim , with the Janus pack to provide markdown support and much more. To test rendering of Markdown, I use vim-markdown-preview - a simple [:Mm] command brings up a browser with the rendered html.
When pushing to my remote git repository a git hook clones the repository, generates the site, and copies the static files to where it gets served from - rudimentary CI for blogging.
Octopress is truly the blogging platform for hackers. I think I’ll stick with it for a while.
Photo by Thomas Lefebvre on Unsplash
