Starting my new blog: Finally Octopress

I wanted to start writing blog ever since I started coding. I never had a success setting it up because of time constraints and many other reasons. During this time, I've evaluated a number of blogging platforms and eventually I thought of using wordpress as my blogging platform when I start my blog.

Now finally I'm having some time. I decided to spend some time everyday dedicating to my blog. So first thing I need to do is setting up a wordpress blog with default template.

I started browsing to find a good theme for the wordpress blog before setting up anything. While browsing, I opened paulirish.com and saw that he'd recently switched his blog to some new blogging software called Octopress.
I also read about Octopress from my daily reading list, but didn't give much attention to it. But I found Paul's blog very neat –– The default theme of Octopress is awesome –– and it's responsive too. I started checking out all Octopress blogs, and how to configure it. Finally I decided to use Octopress for my blog.

Why Octopress and not Wordpress ? #

Octopress is simple and comes up with a neat, elegant ( and responsive ) theme. Obviously Wordpress is really the most powerful and most widely used blogging software, and it has lot of extentions and plugins available. But for me , for writing some tech tips , don't need all those stuff. Using Octopress , I can use familiar git commands , write everything in markdown and finally can deploy to github pages.

Another thing I liked is, all my blog content will be residing in my system itself in the form of markdown files. I can generate my static blog site anytime I need and deploy to number of hosting services. The advantage of a static website over a dynamic platform like Wordpress is : It's loading time will be faster. Because everytime I access a blog post in Wordpress, it need to fetch from the database. But Octopress blog will have only static html pages –– so it will be loaded faster.

How to set up an Octopress blog ? #

This had been covered in many articles. Just google around , you can find a lot. I followed these simple instructions given in the Octopress website. Link is given below

http://octopress.org/docs/deploying/github/

There're couple of good themes built for Octopress ( It's all 3rd party ). Since I like the default Octopress theme, I didn't try any 3rd party themes. But It's worth checking out those.

PS: I'll be writing mainly about Javascript , HTML ,CSS and client side framework and design patterns here. Expect more posts from me soon in this space.

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