July 19, 2012
OK. This is a fresh start. I think I’ve got this blogging thing figured out for once. I’m using Octopress to create the site. I attempted to install Octopress a few months ago, but ran into a whole host issues trying to get ruby 1.9.2 to build. Luckily, Ruby 1.9.3 seems to fix all my issues, and installed smooth as silk. I never really got a chance to use Octopress 1.x, but 2.0 is going great. Here’s what I wanted in a blogging platform.
Pre-rendered HTML pages I don’t have any illusions about the amount of traffic I’ll be getting, so performance isn’t that a concern for me. I do want to avoid the “black box” of PHP and MySQL that I’d been used to with WordPress. The chances of me learning every little detail of the blogging platform are slim, but if I do decide to dive in, I want it to be as easy and as frictionless as possible. Octopress is just a bunch of scripts. Nothing sneaky there!
Easy to modify A little bit of HTML, a bit of javascript, maybe a little ruby. Writing themes and modifying the behavior of the site is something well within my reach.
Run the site locally Right out of the box, Octopress makes it easy to get a full version of your site served locally. Try that, WordPress!
Text only input I want to be able to write a blog post from anywhere on any device. Having plain text input ensures that I’ll have no excuses if I want to get something written. Plus, if I need to search my entries or make bulk changes, I’ve got my command line tools right here. Oh, and shit, I can also sit in coffee shops running full-screen Vim (green text on black background) to look like an über-hacker.
Good code formatting I’d like to make this a mostly develpment blog. Good code formatting is important. Easy code formatting is just as important.
Most importantly, I’ve got a pretty sizeable chunck of writing saved up and ready to deploy. I’m hoping I can just throw these files in my favorite text editor and hit “publish”. I’m sure a few will get thrown out in the editing process, but I’m hoping that I use those first few posts to build up some intertia.
Let’s see where this takes us!