I moved my blog from Posterous to GitHub Pages. Posterous isn’t a bad system and service. It just didn’t fit the way I wanted to manage my site and the content. It was entirely adequate to get going but I was dissatisfied with the web form for creating new posts. It also loaded pages fairly slow.

GitHub is awesome.

Many others have migrated their technical blogs from services like Posterous, Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger and so on over to GitHub Pages. Most often, this is because these services are database backed systems, use a web form for creating posts, and don’t have a revision control system that we all know and love under the covers.

GitHub Pages is a great service by GitHub that allows you to serve up static content out of a Git repository. You can do simple static HTML pages, or you can use a static page generation framework to generate the content out of Markdown (or Textile, or HAML) files. There’s a number of options for this, such as Nanoc or Jekyll.

I chose Jekyll.

“Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby” - http://jekyllrb.com/

Jekyll fits the bill for me. It supports different markup languages, such as Markdown or Textile, and GitHub Pages has easy instructions on how to get going with it. Jekyll also includes a fantastic Posterous importer, which flawlessly imported all my old posts. Now I can start creating new posts as Markdown in Emacs, instead of using a web form, or editing HTML directly. I can also save revisions using Git, instead of saving a draft and monkeying with an interface to recover drafts or publish them.

I sat down a few days ago and imported my old posts. Then I ran through trying to get them to look alright with a decent CSS theme. However, I’m not a front end designer/developer, and I never remember how do do anything useful with CSS. So I went looking for canned ways to build a nice interface/theme for this blog.

I remembered Twitter’s Bootstrap project, and thought that might be interesting. After looking at it I was confused about what to use, since it is a very complete solution, including iOS mobile layouts in addition to normal web pages. After looking elsewhere, I saw mention of Octopress, a framework built on top of Jekyll. I queried some people that had experience with it, found that it would probably meet my needs, and gave it a whirl.

Naturally if you’re familiar with Octopress, you can see the result of that evaluation. It is a really nice system for managing the site.

I like my blogging workflow.

I like my new blogging workflow. It is very natural to me as a system engineer, as it uses Emacs, Rake, a Web Service, and Git. I’ll walk through the steps I took in creating this post. I’m going to skip the setup of Octopress, as that is documented elsewhere.

% rake new_post'[Blog Moved to GitHub Pages]'
Creating new post: source/_posts/2011-09-29-blog-moved-to-github-pages.markdown

Then I load up the source file created by the rake task and enter all this content you see, saving my work along the way. I did, but could choose, to commit to the git repository as well. In order to preview the content, I can actually run the entire blog with Octopress’s built in rake task:

% rake preview
Starting to watch source with Jekyll and Compass. Starting Rack on port 4000
[2011-09-29 23:06:20] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-09-29 23:06:20] INFO  ruby 1.9.2 (2011-07-09) [x86_64-darwin11.1.0]
[2011-09-29 23:06:20] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=92373 port=4000
Configuration from /Users/jtimberman/Development/jtimberman.github.com/_config.yml
Auto-regenerating enabled: source -> public
[2011-09-29 23:06:21] regeneration: 107 files changed
>>> Compass is watching for changes. Press Ctrl-C to Stop.
127.0.0.1 - - [29/Sep/2011 23:06:24] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 50231 0.0181

Now I can browse to http://localhost:4000 and see exactly what the blog post will look like, and it loads lightning fast. This is of paramount importance for me, as I travel a lot and would really like to develop blog entries while I’m on airplanes with no internet access.

Once I am satisfied with the content and how it looks, I commit to the repository and push the source branch.

% git add source/_posts
% git commit -m 'Blog moved to github pages'

Then, it is time to deploy the blog to GitHub Pages. Octopress makes this easy with another rake task:

% rake deploy

This takes care of all the repository work required, and pushes to GitHub. Then I push the actual source branch.

% git push origin source

Nice things about Octopress

Besides the rake tasks and that works with Jekyll, Octopress has some really nice features.

First of all, the default theme is really nice. One thing I wanted out of CSS on top of Jekyll was something large enough that I could read easily. I think this theme looks pretty good and is quite readable with my default browser settings. It is also nice and easily readable on my iPhone.

Second, Octopress is very customizable. I can easily modify the layout by editing the _config.yml file. Of course I can change the theme, but I can add JavaScript, layouts and more. I modified the footer to include my Creative Commons license for the content of this site.

Third, I really like the default layout in this theme. The recent posts, GitHub repo links and my last few tweets are a nice touch. Plus I have integrated Disqus for comments and set up Google Analytics easily, thanks to the ease of customizing the configuration.

Conclusion

In closing, I’m very happy with this solution. I now have a blogging workflow that I’m comfortable with, and that will hopefully result in more posts.