So… I have decided to try my hand at using a new blogging platform thing. This is actually my first post with it. The blogging software is this thing called octopress which is a ruby application (with too many dependencies in my opinion…) that does a lot of the work of producing the icky html and css crap that I hate doing and spits out a nice static set of pages which can either be synced off to your own http server or pushed to something like github pages.

For the last bunches of years I have been using a blogging suite called blogger which was bought by google in the dawn of time. Blogger does all the post sorting/slicing and dicing so you don’t have to do too much icky html or css stuff. However its not great for some stuff like pasting code blocks and also produces a copius amount of code to generate some pretty simple layouts.

Anyway the octopress stuff takes plaintext mardown files as input and spits out delicious static files, so hosting the blog has a lot less surface area when you compare it to rabbit holes like wordpress or whatever other website thing is out there.

I’m not totally thrilled with the amount of dependencies that octopress requires but once things are setup it seems fairly easy to get on with the business of occasionally hammering out a few paragraphs.