Just moved my blog from wordpress.com to Octopress. Octopress runs atop jekyll to generate static files and can deploy to pretty much any hosting provider - but has special tools for hosting on github pages - where this blog is now hosted. First I looked at Jekyll on its own, but seems like it required too much manual configuration - whereas Octopress makes all the choices for you. You just need to make changes.

Blog posts are created by editing a text file locally using Textmate 1 in markdown, generating the blog and deploying. The blog’s filename implies the posting date, for example this posts file name is

sources/_posts/2012-09-07-from-wordpress-to-octopress.markdown

and you also include what they call a YAML UpfrontMatter to the top of every post to include additional metadata. For example for this post:

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---
layout: posta
title: "From wordpress to octopress"
date: 2012-09-07 23:10
comments: true
categories:
---

So far I’m really happy with it. If you’d like to give it a whirl yourself, All the info you need is at Octopress. It’s got a very vibrant community, which is always a good thing.