After years of using Wordpress as my blogging platform I’ve decided to move to Octopress. While there was not necessarily anything wrong with using Wordpress for my blog, I think it was time to move on. Octopress is a blogging framework that is built around the Jekyll.rb project that generates static html sites.

Here’s why I switched:

• It’s Ruby! – Since I spent most of my time coding in Ruby it only made sense to move to a Ruby based blogging platform.
• Focus On Content – I found on my old Wordpress blog, I spent a lot of time configuring my theme and worrying about all the other pages of the site. I decided to concentrate on blog posts. The new setup has the content at the forefront.
• Free Hosting – Octopress is built on top of Jekyll.rb which powers Github Pages. Github Pages hosting is free. Can’t beat that.
• Easy Publishing – Creating and publishing a blog post is as easy as creating a Markdown file, writing my content and then simply running rake deploy
• Site Speed – Octopress sites are just static html. No databases to load. Much faster.
• No More DB Backups – Since I’m deploying the site with Github Pages, I don’t need to worry about backing up the content in the database. The entire thing is in version control with Git.
• Awesome Tech – I get to use SASS and Markdown.
• Easy Comments – Setting up commenting was as easy as adding my Disqus short name to the config.yml file.
• Quick Code Snippets – Octopress includes a code block plugin that includes language specific syntax highlighting.

My hope is that with all of this combined, I’ll write more. I really do enjoy writing about tech topics as I think it helps me solidify my knowledge and hopefully others will find the content useful.