A couple months ago I switched to Octopress. I now have some experience to share.
Overall, my Octopress + Github + Disqus experience has been much better blogger, wordpress and livejournal past before it. I only wish I kept my old posts in HTML instead of converting them to markdown. When I was setting up my blog, I did not know that Octopress could render HTML.
RSS Bugs
I learned not expect much from RSS. In addition to being hard to discover, the default category RSS is buggy. It interprets markdown twice choking on some exciting Telemetry links in my archives. I had to restort to writing a custom mozilla category feed.
The excerpt feature (<!-- more -->) does not work in RSS. To me that defeats the whole point of excerpts, who even reads blog homepages? I do not have time to fix this.
It’s easy to make a mess
I wanted to get rid of some octopress defaults like external CSS, external fonts, modify some layout. I found I could not restrict myself to only editing files in _directories. I think this means that switching to a new theme will be hard. I was lazy and ended up with my content in the same repo as the octopress source. I’ll have to clean up my act before I can share my customizations.
Saving Time
One of the worst parts about my old wordpress blog was the amount of UI one had to go through to create HTML links. My snappy updates have a lot of bugzilla links. I wrote an octopress extension to do most of the link work for me. Syntax looks like:
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If anyone is interested, you can download it here until I clean up my octopress git repository.
Overall I like Octopress and I recommend the octopress/github combo to every developer who is looking to setup a blog. It saves a lot of time and as long as one can deal with lack of unit testing and Ruby, it’s great.