I have always wanted to do a personal blog to share with geek friends my technical findings. And for ages, I have pushed away the time to start a blog. Actually I did tried to start differents blogs but wasn’t fully satisfied. A fiew times, I have tried to build a blog site using MODx CMS - one of my favourit CMS. But MODx is a litle bit too heavy for just a quick blogging site. It’s much better for an internal company CMS or even a commercial site.
I have to admit that after spending nights of trying to do something clean using HTML5 Boilerplate, I realised that state of the art HTML5 web development with javascripts and CSS3 tricks are not THAT easy as some could say! Even for someone that doesn’t fear challenges and waste nights on coding useless stuffs.
After testing some few alternatives (including Tumblr - check my custom one), I finally end up with Octopress. This is just new to me (you are reading my first post :) ), so we’ll see how it goes. But Octopress fit exactly to what I was currently looking for:
- initiate a blog entry with a single command line specifying it’s title
- Edit it using markdown with a nice text editor (I commonly use BBEdit for most of my codings, but markdown is so far edited with Kod. I find it very nice.
- use a quick command line to generate the pages
- locally test it on localhost
- use a last command line to deploy it over rsync on my server once ready!
That’s it, blog entry is then created and hosted as a flat html file with a nice url form.
Of course, this bloging system is a litle bit an advance system that need you to get hands on scripting and configuring a bit your environment. For instance, you will need to install Ruby 1.9.2 or greater which is not the standart version you would have on a mac (I guess microsoft OS users would not be reading this blog that far …) + 2 or 3 other litle stuffs that are well documented on Octopress setup page.
