If you’re a regular visitor, you’ve noticed a recent change. I decided to switch my blogging engine to Octopress. I was content with MovableType 5 and it worked very well for me while I was using it, but I decided that Octopress suited my needs better. So far, I’m pretty pleased with the new look and feel of the blog. I downloaded and installed Justin Kelley’s Octopress theme and made some pretty insignificant changes to it.
I switched for a variety of reasons:
- Because I could: I’m a hopeless tinkerer. I wanted to try something different, so I did. Mucking around behind the scenes is a significant chunk of the what I enjoy about blogging. Switching just gives me a good bit more of that same fun.
- Feels More Responsive: This isn’t a scientific measurement at all, but the blog renders much faster than it did previously with Movable Type 5.
- Mobile Layout: All of the reviews seem to suggest that Octopress is very mobile friendly. About 10% of my traffic comes from mobile devices, so I wanted to make sure the blog was presented to them nicely.
- Using a Text Editor for Blogging: In Octopress each blog article is a separate text file that you can work with in your favorite text editor. I prefer this to Movable Type’s web-based editor.
Quite a few people have blogged about the virtues of switching to Octopress and their reasons are all reasons that I decided to take the plunge. Rather than re-hash what they’ve aleady covered, here’s a few links I found helpful in my research:
- I Migrated To Octopress From Movable Type by Pat Regan
- Switching to Octopress by Aijaz Ansari
- Why I Switched to Octopress by Akash Devaraju
- Advantages of Octopress by Alex Blewitt
- Blogging with Octopress by Matt Gemmell