It’s been almost two years since this blog last changed significantly, and in that time
I’ve become a bit dissatisfied with it for a few reasons:
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WordPress is excellent, but it’s over-featured for what I need, and its PHP/MySQL guts are opaque. I don’t really like the idea of all my writing being inside a big database either; it’s a single point of failure, and that makes me uneasy.
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Despite using various caching plugins (WP-supercache, W3 Total Cache, DBCache Reloaded), the site still became very unresponsive during the several fireballs I’ve had.
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I’ve become increasingly invested in a philosophy of simplicity and portability. I do all my writing in the Markdown format, for example, and I value software that’s laser-focused and as purposeful as possible (that’s why I do most of my work in BBEdit).
For all these reasons, I’ve decided to make a change: this blog is now entirely static HTML, or is “baked” as the term seems to be.
The system I’m using to generate the blog is called Octopress by Brandon Mathis, which is a framework around Jekyll. You can run it wherever you like (locally, or even on your server), and it will generate an entirely static web site for you, and even rsync it to where you’re hosting from.
If you’re wondering about whether to “bake” your own blog or site, I can recommend these three posts by Brent Simmons on why you should consider it. I can also highly recommend Octopress as the means of doing it.
A few points of note:
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I now use Disqus for comments. It’s an excellent service, and free. They can import comments from your WordPress (or other) blog, and those comments will persist if your new permalinks are the same as the old ones (as they ought to be), and naturally they support Akismet, Gravatar, and all manner of social media integration. The admin/moderation dashboard is excellent too. Really, give them a try.
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I exported all of my existing WordPress posts to suitable Markdown files using exitwp. I tweaked the script a little to not perform any HTML-to-Markdown conversion whatsoever, so I could preserve my already Markdown-formatted posts with their existing paragraph breaks etc.
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The visual design of this blog is just the default Octopress theme. I think it’s attractive and very readable, and don’t see much reason to change it. It’s all about the content, after all. It also has a mobile equivalent built in.
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Octopress knows about Twitter, Google Analytics, Google Plus and various other services, and has built-in integration with them. One of the main things that have impressed me about Octopress is how it seems to have the same opinion as I do regarding what’s needed and what’s superfluous.
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It also includes a preview server for local staging, which will regenerate the site on-the-fly as you make changes.
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This is a moderately large blog (there are about 930 posts spanning several years, cross-linked across various categories). On this machine (3.4 GHz i7, 16 GB, SSD), a full generation takes about 1 minute and 15 seconds.
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If you want to use the wonderful MarsEdit blogging app on OS X with Octopress, you can! Dan Weeks wrote a script for that.
I’m sure there will be some rough spots as with any redesign, and feel free to get in touch to point them out, but overall I’m very, very happy indeed. The site should be more responsive under load, and it’s eminently portable, requiring nothing but a dumb web server.
As a final aside, if you’re looking for an excellent VPS host to put your own blog or site up on, I highly recommend Linode.
And now that’s entirely enough blogging about blogging, for another year or two at least.