Octopress logo

While blogging platforms like Squarespace are awesome, they carry a lot baggage. I don’t need all the fancy plugins, user management or a database which slows the whole site down and makes it prone to getting Fireballed. That’s pretty much why I’m taking the route many developers seem to be taking lately. Github Pages and Jekyll/Octopress.

What is Jekyll and Octopress?

I’ll just let the creators explain it themselves:

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub. – Jekyll wiki

Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll […]. To start blogging with Jekyll, you have to write your own HTML templates, CSS, Javascripts and set up your configuration. But with Octopress All of that is already taken care of. Simply clone or fork Octopress, install dependencies and the theme, and you’re set. – Octopress

First Impression

OK, I’m admittedly not that far in the game yet, but it looks really slick thus far. Setting it up was really easy and there are some really nice looking 3rd party themes. Plus it is mainly written in Ruby, my language of choice, which enables me to fiddle with it, if needed. If you’re more comfortable in PHP you might want to check out Marco Arment’s SecondCrack.