Well I finally did it, I moved my blog from Wordpress to Octopress, what drove me to make this move?
Well, there were a few factors involved…
I found the following problems and frustrations with Wordpress:
- Changing a Wordpress theme is somewhat of a black art.
- My blog didn’t look its best on mobile devices, there was no fluid layout.
- Wordpress seems to introduce a fair bit of latency for somethings thats essentially a simple task i.e. get some text from a database.
- Reliance on a database.
All my post were in a MySQL database although easily maintained I had to have it hosted somewhere. - Work press editing is both buggy and frustrating.
I used to get near the end of a complex post only to find that save draft crashed the editor and I lost all my changes! - Embedding code into a blog involved a Wordpress plugin, a Visual Studio plugin and manual manipulation of Html.
So what do I get from Octopress?
In a single word:
Simplicity
- No database or hosting is is needed, the blog is statically generated and all hosted on Github.
- I don’t need to use a clunky web based editor. I can use a simple text editor as all post are written in .markdown format.
- I get a nice simple elegant blog:
- A Semantic Html 5 template.
- A Mobile first responsive layout.
- Built in 3rd party support for Twitter, Google Plus One, Disqus Comments, Pinboard, Delicious, and Google Analytics.
- An easy deployment strategy using Github pages or Rsync.
- Built in support for POW and Rack servers.
- Easy theming with Compass and Sass.
- A Beautiful Solarized syntax highlighting.
So here here I am with my first post, I’m really pleased so far. If you want to find out more details on how this all works checkout Octopress.
Until next time.