Over the weekend I noticed a few coding bloggers had switched to Octopress. I noticed the advantages for a developer who doesn’t need a content management system (CMS) using web forms to update a website. It may sound like I am reverting to the way people blogged 10 years ago with a static HTML website; but is not at all the case. With modern programming tools like…

• Ruby gems like capistrano for deployment,
• Git (SCM) to manage both the code to generate my site and generated code,
• local development using Ruby to build my now Jekyll powered website,
• and my favorite text editor, TextMate, to generate, edit and preview the content

… the choice of leaving WordPress for my personal blog/site and using Octopress (Ruby, Jekyll) and some using handy tools like Git and Capistrano just felt right. And yeah my site is now static HTML, Javascript, CSS and not using any PHP, MySQL, and I like it that way.

And to boot any other content, or code (e.g. demos, apps) that I choose to add to my site, doesn’t need to be part of any CMS and can deploy along site the blog.

A few other things that just make me happy are:

• no WordPress updates when a security issues is discovered
• The Octopress plugins are cool: Gist Tag, Render Partial, Github Style codeblock, Category Generator
  • I can include code snippets from a download folder
  • Or import a Gist from github.com
• Since the site is generated with rake tasks, resulting in Web standards code (HTML, CSS, Javascript) I can test preview the site on my localhost easily…

Well that sums up what made me happy about the switch.