Octopress Posted on Feb 22nd, 2012

Update It's been quite a while since my last blog post, due to work and various university side projects. Over the next few posts I'll be trying to give a more detailed view of what I've actually been up to. In the mean time, I'll discuss my new website woodiwiss.me. To kickstart my blogging brain back into gear, I have decided to re-vamp said website. One of the biggest changes, is switching my blog platform over to Octopress. Opposed to the old one which was using the ever popular WordPress. My main reasoning for this was that I wanted a lighter and easier way to manage my blog, while keeping full control over my site. So far Octopress has ticked all the boxes for me. I just need to find the time to re-theme it! I'll try to explain some of the epicness of octopress below.

Perks

Switching to Octopress has yielded many personal benefits. Here are a few of the cool features I've enjoyed so far:

• It's responsive straight out of the box. Try to resize your browser now and it should adapt to the space available. This helps with the readability and efficiency, especially when loaded on mobile devices. You can also demo the responsive nature of the site here.
• Posts are written in markdown, then pre-processed into HTML. So while writing a blog post I can be pretty confident that it will display as I indent it to. This keeps my mind focused on the content of my posts, rather than the code required to display it.
• Octopress doesn't require a database. Octopress serves my pages as static content. While this enhances the security of my site, it also removes the dependency of a database to store posts on. While there are possible downsides to this, I personally find this approach to be quite liberating.
• SSH & R-sync to push new posts to my live server. Linking to the last point, opposed to a database I have a folder called 'posts' with all my markdown files in it, I also have this hosted on Dropbox. This allows me to access the files on my iPad and create posts while on the go, or while inspiration strikes. When I return home, the post are waiting for me and can be deployed with 2 simple commands:

$ rake generate
$ rake deploy
<then enter password>  

Then my live site is updated and good to go. There are many other awesome features to Octopress that I haven't covered, but if you've read this far it may be worth checking out.