Breaking up is always hard to do.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of moving to my own blog site. This has come from many recommendations and a good argument from the book “Soft Skills”. While I am still planning on posting on Medium regularly I will end up moving my every-other-day postings to the new blog.

The hardest thing of course is what engine is best? Of course there is always wordpress, the largest cms platform out there. While is is a very good option as well as experience using wordpress is good for many web development jobs. I have two main problems with it. First off I find it bloated. Don’t get me wrong it's very fast, and good. However there is many things I don’t need and not sure I would even ever use. As well its running on PHP. I don’t mind PHP in fact most of my web history has been in PHP, but I would love a Ruby blog engine as it could be some continued good experience in Ruby.

Octopress has caught my attention as a Ruby based blog engine. It is interesting in the fact there is no web management, you write and post new blogs via the terminal and commands like:

$ octopress new post “My Title”

your post are even formatted in markdown, making it easy to make nice looking post, as well if you wanted to copy in a post written in a markdown tool it would be very easy to do so. One of the biggest problems I see with this project though is it only has one active developer. Meaning longevity of the project isn’t always clear. However, with it being in Ruby it could make a great project to contribute too.

The other big engine I am looking at is “Publify” which gloats about being “..[being] around since 2004 and is the oldest Ruby on Rails open source project alive”. They even have a demo page setup to see their project, but that demo page is dead. They also boast twitter integration for post, and “advance SEO capabilities”. While this project only seems to have 1 currently active developers a look at the graphs show the project does get a good amount of help from time to time from others. With the last active commits being 5 days ago.

I’m still a little up in the air on engines, and will probably need to install a few on VM’s to get a good idea of what I want to go with. If you have any ideas or suggestions let me know in comments or on my twitter feed.

As always thanks for reading, and follow me on twitter for more daily updates and post on my journey from Senior IT Admin to Junior Developer.