Replacing Wordpress with Octopress

About a month ago I embarked once again on an adventure of replacing my WordPress blogging platform with something more Ruby friendly. I say once again because the last time I have tried, after 30 minutes or so of more or less futile search, I simply gave up. This time the urge was stronger and I was even luckier. But first, let me explain a bit my motivation for change.

The motivation

Most of the people probably would not argue that the WordPress is the most powerful blogging platform in the world. Besides the platform itself, that can be customized until the kingdom comes, there is a whole ecosystem of powerful add-ons. And yes, you need those addons. You need sitemap generator, Google analytics, backups/restores, Dropbox integration, themes and whatnot. Lastly, you are interested in putting some text on the interenet and you really don’t care how, right?

Itch that did not want to go away

Probably right for the most people, but I had an itch that needed to be scratched. For me, being a professional developer, WordPress was not that cool. And besides, I wanted some solution that was more Ruby friendly (being a Ruby hacker after all), so I might be able to hack something on top of it one day. Other reasons for ditching WordPress were more budget oriented. I am running this blog on DigitalOcean’s smallest instance (512 megs of RAM) and it didn’t occur once that my blog went down beacuse MySQL ran out of RAM. Yes, I turned linux swap on once I realized that was the issue, but the thought that the whole WordPress thing is just too much for my needs remained stuck in my brain.

Enter The Octopress!

Long story short, I found Octopress which allows me to create my posts using markdown and from there it generates static html pages served by nginx. This means no database, no server-side code, no swapping, no complicated backup/restore add-ons - just some code repository! It works similar to e.g. AngularJS toolchain - a bunch of templates on one end, some templating engine inbetween and raw html, css and javascript on the other. The only difference is that there are no nodejs, gruntjs, bower and what have you. Just some Ruby code. Sweet!