Jekyll and Poole

OK let’s do this. After talking about this for ages, it’s time to switch my blog to GitHub Pages. After a quick search I found this nice blogpost that describes how to set up GitHub Pages using poole.

I’ve tried a few different options for running my blog in the past. Years ago I started with WordPress, then for a short while I tried hosting Orchard CMS myself, then switched to Blogger. But I’ve never felt inspired by their workflows, and those blog sites just feel too heavy-weight for me.

I’m a lazy developer, and the only way I’m going to bother writing blogs, is if I can do it with fairly little friction. I don’t want to log into a website or bother with special blogging software. I’ve been using Markdown and git for writing my personal notes for the last 2 years or so, so I figured it would be a good idea to use Markdown and git for my blog as well.

Some things I want out of the blogging platform:

• write my blog posts using Markdown – no hassles with CSS and syntax highlighters etc
• ability to keep my blog posts, especially drafts, offline so I can work on it whenever a new thought pops in my mind
• simple workflow for working on drafts until I’m ready to publish a post
• not being tied to a specific blogging platform
• being able to easily switch themes or add custom pages etc

I’m just starting with Jekyll and GitHub Pages now, but so far it seems like this might just work for me.

FYI, my previous blog is lombard.me – I’m still deciding if it’s worth migrating the posts from Blogger to Jekyll.