Looking Ahead to Octopress 3.0

When you’ve got a blog and haven’t posted for a very long time, it’s hard to post something without pointing out how long it’s been or making a promise to start blogging more. I haven’t blogged in a long time and I hope to start doing so more regularly again.

There.

So, what’s the first thing that a nerd does before blogging again? Tinker with blogging software, of course.

What’s wrong with Jekyll?

Nothing, really. In fact, I managed to hack together some emacs config and rake tasks that more or less did things the way I wanted them done: easily start a new draft, publish said draft and mindlessly publish (via rsync). It worked pretty well, at least for this blog. (More big claims: I might start other blogs this year).

But there’s Octopress!

When I first converted this blog from Drupal to Jekyll, I remember looking at Octopress. Aside from the “Kubrik of Jekyll” theme, the thing that always bugged me was “start by cloning this repository” as instructions. I want my blogging tool to be a package I install and commands I use to manage my blog.

Apparently, back in October, I stumbled across the next generation of Octopress. I don’t even remember how. (Yes, this post has been a long time coming). A few weeks ago, the official teaser post came out and nicely summarized some of the features. Essentially, Octopress 3 does the things I want and more. Things I dig so far:

1. It’s now a gem with octopress new draft and octopress publish, etc.
2. My rsync rake task is cleanly replaced by octopress deploy
3. Octopress “ink”: allows for installable themes (no more “clone this repo”).
4. You can work on just your current post with octopress isolate which is great when your blog (however sporadically used) dates back over a decade.

Maybe nicer tools won’t make for better writing habits, but it definitely won’t hurt.

Here’s to writing more, in public, at my own domain in 2015.