Developers are like women. From time to time they need new framework, language or sometimes, even new blogging platform.
For quite long time I’ve got this idea to change something on my blog. Old version was heavy, took some time to load and most important, template was noisy and didn’t look so well.
Initially, I didn’t plan to migrate whole blog. I just wanted new, minimalistic theme for WordPress, but I couldn’t find anything suitable, even among paid (premium) themes. There were some candidates but we, programmers, need one, essential feature: main content column should be wide and allow to present code snippets in a pretty way.
Research
I’ve lost hope that I will finally find my ideal WP skin and some day at work discussion about blogging, blogging platforms emerged. There were some sites mentioned that I haven’t heard about before: Ghost or Medium. Some people also started praising Octopress. This discussion showed me that there are some interesting alternatives to WordPress and encouraged me to start digging deeper. I’ve spent two evenings on research, even migrated my blog to Ghost, but paid service and non-trivial self-hosting weren’t something I was very excited of.
Then I started looking at Octopress. Firstly I tried to find theme that was minimal and suitable for blogging developer. Surprisingly I was able to find more than one in a very short time. And this with some more advantages of Octopress convinced me to start my migration process.
Octopress pros:
- many themes well-suited for blogging developers
- free hosting on Github
- blazingly fast, static pages
- I can write posts in my favourite IDE
Migration
As I am not the very first person that made a decision to switch from WordPress to Octopress, migration was simple and clearly explain. There are some good posts that helped me along the way:
Minor issues
As usual, whole process is seamless but… with some small exceptions:
- image displayed on blog posts after conversion were too big. I guess it has something with WP auto sizing feature which wasn’t included in exported xml data. I had to manually resize some images so they could fit into the blog.
- missing images horizontal alignment. I had to manually add –>(image)<– to every image.
- code snippets had to be formatted from the scratch as Syntax Highlighter placeholders were different than those in Octopress
- default RSS url /atom.xml is different than default in WordPress: /feed so I need to apply some tricks to make rss look the same after migration. More details about what needs to be done in the post from Luosky.
- keywords for blog posts weren’t migrated to Octopress. I had to add them manually.
- no SEO at all. WordPress has pretty good support to almost any SEO feature you can think about. In Octopress this requires some changes and additional work. Here are some good posts about SEO in Octopress:
Summary
So that was relation of my short journey from WordPress to Octopress. At the end of it, I must say I am happy with the results: page looks better, loads faster and programming part of me has a new toy to play with 🙂
However, my website is still in early alpha so if you spot any issues or have any feedback what is missing or what could be done better, please let me know in the comments. Thanks in advance
