I have migrated the clunky, dusty old Wordpress blog into Octopress, the spiffy, mostly-Ruby-powered, static blog site generator. While the primary impetus for this migration was the promise of editing all of my blog posts directly in Vim, it’s also pretty cool to have the whole site built on SASS and sitting in a Git repository on my laptop.

If you want to know more about why this is awesome and you should do it, too, read on.

There are a few reasons that Octopress is the correct choice for the hacker writer:

1. Use your choice of editors (my primary reason for trying it out).
2. Complete control over the layout and styles without wrangling complicated themes or PHP code or whatever else.
3. Total version control; place your entire blog site, including the Octopress application code that generates it, into a VCS repository.
4. This is a big one. Static sites have almost no security concerns. This blog is generated on my local machine and sync’d to my live server with rsync. You can’t hack it because it’s not an application.
5. What could be faster than serving static files? All the dynamic aspects are Javascript plug-ins (Disqus for comments, Smarterer on the right side, sharing on social networks, etc.)

It feels wonderful to be able to write a blog post with sane line wrapping and text formatting (in Markdown, of course) and then have that content translated to HTML and cross-referenced with the other pages of the site automatically. This approach puts content creation where it belongs (on the desktop), and presents the data in hypertext where it belongs (on the web).

Can’t remember when you wrote that article about XYZ? Just grep it.

In any case, this is a new experiment for me, so bear with the layout and styles of the site as I continue to hone them, which I’m sure I will do.