Blogging with Octopress

As some of you may know, even though I don't blog all that often, I do mess about with it a lot. Mostly on what makes it run. Switching between Croogo, a custom built CakePHP site, Wordpress .. and back again.

For some reason none of them really seemed what I wanted. Croogo is cool enough, but actually adding posts is a hassle, and theming the thing was more of a puzle. Wordpress does the blogging thing really well, but it always feels ugly, and I had to rely on various plugins to make my post-flow work. I like writing in Markdown. There's a couple of Markdown plugins for Wordpress, but I would still have to copy paste stuff in webinterface, and had to hack it to allow for code-snippet sharing.

Enter Octopress

I somehow stumbled upon Octopress earlier this week, and decided to give it a go. Short conclusion: It's awesome.

I won't go into all of the features, as that's nicely explained on their site, but basically it allows for this workflow:

• Run rake preview in the background
• Write my posts in Markdown, with some settings in the top such as title, publish date, etc.
• Hit save
• See the changes in the browser
• When happy, rake deploy

Now, the deploy function is very awesome. It automatically generate the site to a public folder, commits the whole thing to your git repository, and pushes it. When linked to a Github Pages site it will auto update your site.

So yeah, this is good stuff, as I can just write my plain text files like I want to, and without any further webinterfacing and option clicking I can publish new articles.