After two years with WordPress I decided to again move to a totally different blogging engine. WordPress started to annoy me when I wanted to write a post about a testing framework I had implemented in Dart. This post contains one block of code and the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress made it a pain to just type it in. I somehow got around this with typing it in somewhere else, copying it into the editor and fumbling with the font settings.

There is a Markdown plugin for WordPress, but then all posts are handled by it – even if they weren’t written using Markdown.

Back then I read about Jekyll and Octopress and started playing with it.

Octopress seemed like a good starting point as it contains some useful rake tasks and a framework for a blog. I didn’t like the theme and even being able to change the colors wasn’t enough to make it attractive for me. I was satisfied with the theme I used in the WordPress blog.

So really hard editing and much cleanup was needed. I learned a bit about liquid, the templating library used in Jekyll and had an occasion to code in Ruby again.

Unfortunately, the transition won’t be as imperceptible as I would wish for. I have never before looked into the templates for RSS and Atom feeds but since Octopress only comes with a template for an Atom feed and I still wanted to serve a RSS feed for those who have subscribed it, I needed to have a deeper look into this topic.

Wordpress generates its page numbers as ids for the entries in a feed even though you don’t see that page number anywhere else and permalinks use a human readable format.

The new feeds now again contain ids based on the permalinks and many feed readers will most likely display the feed as a whole bunch of new entries. Sorry about that.

Thanks to Apache rewrite rules everything else should work as before.

You’ll probably notice that there is no more search box at the top. That’s because there is no database. All pages are generated and served statically. Take a search engine of your choosing and search for anything you’d like to find there with “beeger.net” as a context. Since it’s all static again, the search engines should have no problem indexing the site.