Chinmay

Blogger to Octopress

Recently shifted my blog from Blogger to Octopress.

Blogger world

Ridiculously easy to set up. Custom domain without much hassle. Awesome support for SEO and analytics.

Running into problems with Blogger

  1. No markdown support
  2. Getting code in your blog could be ugly
  3. WYSIWYG editor is a big fat lie
  4. Very limited templates
  5. Doesn’t have a hacker workflow — Sublime, git, markdown, CLI

Tried WordPress (plugin issues, MySQL dependency), DocPad, Ghost, Hexo. Couldn’t relate to any of them.

Octopress

Discovered through GitHub Pages and Jekyll. Runs on Jekyll, very easy to use, supports the desired workflow.

Getting started: Requires Ruby. Gotcha: Stick with Ruby 1.9.3, don’t try 2.0.

Porting old blogs: Export blogger XML, use a Ruby gist to convert. Gotcha: Need nokogiri gem: gem install nokogiri --pre

Deploying to GitHub Pages: No runtime dependency — just HTML, CSS, JS. Gotcha: Deploying to username.github.io messes up project pages. Add CNAME file, edit DNS entry.

Adding Disqus comments: Setup account with Disqus, add disqus_short_name to _config.yml. Gotcha: Set comments: true flag in every post.

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