Migration to Octopress¶

| blog |

Objectives¶

I’ve been blogging for several years (2009-2014) using Google Blogger My old blogspot blog. It was a great experience. But, I always felt some discomfort. I couldn’t simply write without thinking how it will be rendered. I was distracted by blog engine.

Moving away¶

Additional inspiration for moving away came from the essay Blogging Like a Hacker. Finally, I made a decision to use GitHub Pages for blogging. There were two choices: Jekyll or Octopress. I picked Octopress because of the pre-bundled minimal required blogging features. I.e. it’s not required the additional configuration to start blogging right away.

The official Octopress documentation has step-by-step guide for blog setup. It’s very convenient and transparent.

Theme¶

I didn’t want to use the default Octopress theme (it’s boring). Theme customization required some time. All others free themes are too complex, IMHO.

At the end I found this theme and applied it to my new blog.

Main features¶

Here I selected the main features which I like the most:

markdown for blogging
simple code snippets insertion
full blog customization
Ruby at the bottom (I love this language)
ability to use your favorite text editor (Textmate in my case) for blogging

Minor Issues¶

I’ve tried to migrate posts form my old blog to Octopress, tried different approaches. But, I had no success. Actually, I had ugly results, which should be manually fixed.

P.S.¶

There are tons of different Static Site Generators, see the next resources:

But, Jekyll and Octopress are at the top.