Just finished installing Octopress. And it’s great. It’s much nicer to work on than wordpress (which web-based article editing, well, is at the least frustrating).

Don’t get me wrong. Wordpress is a fine platform, but it’s kinda “heavyweight”, and provides much more than I really need. Octopress on the other hand has only the basics, and let’s you build your blog as you go. Editing a text file on your editor of choice is much much better than using wordpress’ web-based editor. (Yes, I know that e.g. Blogilo exists).

Workflow on Octopress is also different. Basically:

1. Create a new blog post in an empty text file.
2. Generate static pages in public/
3. Copy the static pages on your web server (deploy).

This is why it’s good to keep octopress away from your www folder. I’ve created a small bash script to handle 2 and 3 above, most people use git or rsync to deploy, but since the octopress installation is on the same machine as apache, a simple cp is fine.

I did mess it up at first try. My whole www folder was deleted by accident, luckily I have a not-so-recent backup, so I should get everything back. Glad I sticked through with Octopress despite this fact.

Back to posts