I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging for a while. Blogging seems like the 2006 thing to do, right? Nevertheless, I really enjoy the technologies I get to work with on an almost daily basis - namely iOS, Grails and various mobile frameworks (JQuery Mobile, Backbone.js, underscore.js, etc.), and hopefully I run across a few things that might be of use to some other people. At least I’d like to use this blog to help give an outlet to that illusion. Having a blog also lets me rant about things and have it stored online for an indeterminate amount of time - who doesn’t like having their words haunt them for years on end?

So with all that being said, I’ve had a long list of weak excuses why I hadn’t gotten a blog going, and high on the list was pretty things like

• Need to figure out where to host it
• Need to figure out what software to use
• Need to figure out what styling to use

Well I’ve read enough to determine that Octopress is the developer’s Wordpress (I probably first noted it being used on Matt Gemmell’s blog, and his post his experiences blogging with Octopress). I also determined GitHub is as good of a place as any to host one, for starters at least - and works well with Git-hosted Octopress. Octopress’s default theme (which this blog uses) provides good enough styling for a developer-centric blog in my opinion - for the time being at least.

For now I’m using Mouapp for my Markdown editor - recommended by @zanthrash - while I thought I liked the idea of posting to Octopress from MarsEdit, I actually like the raw markdown editing better and being able to see the markup in the same window, vs. building html formatted posts. Plus it isn’t that hard to create a new post in Mao, save it to my local blog posts folder, and do a rake generate and deploy - and have it pushed to my github pages repo see it live online - immediately. I’m sure this will be a process that will scriptable to make it even easier to do with future posts.

A couple things I did note during the process - which probably are obvious to many but weren’t initially to me

• To ensure that individual blog pages get generated properly you must have the markdown section rake’s new_post command generates at the top of your markdown file
• Strings should be in quotes in your Octopress _config.yml file, or you’ll likely get parse errors

If anyone has tips to make the use of these technologies even better going forward please pass them along.