A comparision of WordPress and Octopress as seen my a moron.

Well, as advertised, I attempted to recreate this blog post using Octopress (OP) in an attempt to compare the two blogging experiences. Initially, after reviewing my notes, the process seemed straight-forward.

• Run a rake-task that generates a new post (and all the trappings that accompany it).
• Copy this post into the markdown file
• Run a rake-task to generate the necessary files. Here you can run a rake-task to preview the site locally.
• Run a rake-task to push to GitHub Pages.
• Commit all the new changes to GitHub & push to my branch.
• Done.

I nailed the first two steps. I mean, totally nailed it -__- . What proceed to unfold was a journey through StackOverflow, scouring the Octopress docs, and blindly shredding my local repo with git merges, reset --hard HEAD’s and the like. The issue was that I performed step 5 after step 2. It’s that easy. Let me be clear; I screwed it up. Octopress had nothing to do with it. It really is simple and in many ways superior to WordPress (WP), but I’m an idiot and can’t follow directions very well.

Conclusion

All in all, I really do enjoy the Octopress experience. I love interacting with my computer with the command-line and I love writing in Sublime Text 3. I think I need some more practice with Octopress so I’m going to go with that format for now. Case closed.

Original Post

I’m trying to figure out exactly which platform suits me best, WordPress (WP) or GitHub Pages (GP).

WP is so easy to crank out a quick post and there’s tons of 3rd party support/widgets/plugins. It satisfies the “I should blog more but I don’t have anything to say really…but I’m going to write a quick post anyways” side of me. Disclaimer: this post is of the aforementioned variety :)

GP satisfies the neck-beard/control-freak side of me that wants to do everything his damn self even if it winds up taking twice as long (at least the first few times…).

With GP, writing a post feels more like writing a piece of code. Everything is composed locally (so I get to use my favorite editor, Sublime Text 3) and pushed to GitHub for publication. Plus, its interpretation of Markdown is really convenient when the topic is something technical and I want to include some code related to the project. The downside to using GP is that since I’m such an infrequent blogger, I’ve always got to check my notes to remember the workflow of how to create a new post and where to push and to which repo and so on and so forth. But that’s not really even a problem with GP, that’s a result of me not blogging enough! As a lazy person, WP is very tempting. You just visit your dashboard and start typing.

I’m considering using them both: WP as more of a dairy for quick posts covering a broader range of topics, with GP mainly being used for updates on my technical projects. Best of both worlds…but it seems…unnecessary.

I know, I’ll create this same exact post in GP. Then I’ll write a follow-up post and compare and contrast the two further.