Switch to Octopress

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on the Octopress
project. It's essentially a cleaned up framework around the Jekyll
blogging "engine" that Github Pages uses (an my site). It gives it a
clean HTML 5 template, some nice plugins, etc. Since it's essentially
just a pretty version of Jekyll, I knew that it would be possible to
swtich with minimal work and saved it for when I was on vacation and
looking for little personal projects to work on.

Switching was fairly simple. The only thing that really required work
was porting over my post_filter code from my Jekyll fork. Basically, I
added a bunch of hooks to Jekyll to allow me to run plugins before and
after rendering, and after a page was written to the disk. Hooking into
that allows me to do things like auto-post items to my archive blog, and
send out bitly links to Twitter when something is posted.

Luckily, I've learned a lot about ruby since I wrote that stuff, and was
now competent to do it with monkey patching the jekyll gem instead of
having to keep a fork -- which made it really clean. Once that was
there, my other plugins started working immediately.

Since Octopress is just Jekyll under the hood, all of my other things
worked without any intervention. My email-to-post script works, as well
as my automatic Dropbox publishing stuff that I setup.

In fact, the only thing I had to fix was some formatting for a few posts
that have code or gists embedded in them. I'm happy with my
decision -- now to just blog a little more and maybe customize the
template a little bit.