Compiled Are I

While I’m not specifically trained as an author of prose, I am trained as an author of code. What would happen if I approached blogging from a software development perspective? What would that look like? Tom Preston-Werner

I feel alone, the pixels from Blogging Like A Hacker speaking of freedom and peace in minimalism and simplicity, and feel the weight of a time long past since some first seeked the right tools to build their prose.

Though a bit too late, I have suffered the same itch, spent time scrutinizing their remedies, and come to adopt a cure that leaves me content. Hence, I leave my share of fresh debris on this old field, in the hope that it serves some whom none could before.

The Choice

Many cures exist. Most were short-lived, personal hacks lacking documentation effort, of which the popular ones made up for with their expressive community. I was looking for the perfect blend of malleability, strength and a good instruction manual.

1. toto: Tiny (~300 sloc), built to work with git and Heroku out of the box, this was my dream engine for a while; then I realised it's a bit too tied in with Heroku for my comfort (I'm forced to live behind a draconian proxy). It has a bunch of features that I'm still working on incorporating into my current cure, and this beautiful guide.

2. Jekyll: Possibly the most popular of the lot, with a really neat framework to get started with, and solid backing from the big players (Github Pages uses this) and community. Perfect for the blogger focused on blogging, with no desires to spend time tweaking their platform to perform silly stunts.

3. nanoc: My pick, and my reasons for this can also be counted as my reasons against the options above:

   i. Actively maintained: The release at the time of this post was on January 9, 2012. They've got a pretty busy forum and an IRC channel too, and seeing Denis (the creator) still involved after having created it way back in 2007 instills some amount of faith in the project.

   ii. Brilliantly documented: This engine has the most extensive, in-depth documentation of the one's I've evaluated. This includes API documentation, a bunch of mini-tutorials on customizing the engine, some deployment and best-practices guides and a whole lot of community- contributed material.

   iii. Powerful: This could be a corollary of the two above; with the depth of documentation at hand, anyone with basic Ruby skills can extend the engine to perform breathtaking acrobatic manoeuvers.

The Switch

The power of customizability carries the burden of the time it consumes. Ideally, you'd tweak until it's just perfect, when really, it never is. The switch was meant to be painless, but the more I realised was possible, the longer the silence on my old blog, as I toiled behind my shiny new nanoc3 site hosted on Heroku.

This post was intended to be a practical, comprehensive guide to the switch from Wordpress, but the time lapsed between that process and now leaves me with just a bunch of references that guided me through.

References

1. nanoc3_blog: A well done starter kit for nanoc3, with minimalistic styling and a bunch of useful blog features like archives, tags and pages.

2. nanoc_fuel: The one stop solution to adding Facebook likes and comments to your nanoc3 blog.

3. Octopress: While a Jekyll framework, the features curated by this project are easily embeddable into any nanoc3 blog.

The switch is quickest if you know exactly what you want, and can dabble in Ruby without fear. While you're at it, the place to be is the nanoc group.