Moved to Github Pages

Yep, that’s right, I have moved my blog. I thought that posterous was the place to be. And the integration with google docs worked nice. But I wasn’t satisfied. I missed some control, and posterous was growing into a social media platform instead of a blogging platform. I missed some features, like good syntax highlighting and markdown support.

So, why did I go with Github Pages? Well, first I thought let’s write this myself. But there are already so many blogging platforms, and to be honest: I wouldn’t know when to build this. Now I have something that I can easily port or host myself. The posts are easily maintained in markdown.

What is Github Pages and how do my posts look like?

Github Pages is a simple way to host static html files. There is no dynamic pages support. But the pages are run through Jekyll before being hosted. Jekyll converts markdown files and … to html files and copies everything else over. The files are pulled from a github repository. This means that everything is under version control, you can create branches and you can fork someone else’s website. Go ahead, fork my blog :-)

The moving itself was just a lot of work, but that is because I did this manually. I wanted all my posts to be converted to markdown, and not simply copy the html files. There are converters, but I didn’t try that out.

I really like the concept of generated files. I allows me to maintain the templating seperate from the actual content, but doesn’t lay any requirements on the hosting so moving again is easy. Downside is that hosting comments on your own blog is impossible. There are comment-services, but I decided to redirect feedback to google+ or twitter. That way reacting for me is easier.

The autoposting to my twitter account is done through if this then that. I hope that they will add google+ support in the near future.

Let the posts start flowing!