Day 2
Well, I was supposed to report back in on how it’s been going with Octopress after using it a while. It’s now been 512 days, or one year and 147 days, or about 17 months which is about one year and five months.
It’s basically been going okay. The process isn’t bad. I put up posts now and then with varying frequency. Some are “full” posts with picture and permission, some are occasionally long, and some are short, ~tweet-length updates.
I like Octopress a lot. The best part is writing in Markdown which means my source files are all plain text and I have a copy of all of them, so the blog is already in my possession and easily read without any software or publishing.
The Octopress scripts are easy to use. Right now I run a new_post command to create a file, edit the file with Emacs, then re-generate the blog and finally push the changes up to Github which is where I publish it.
Adding an image is hardly more difficult than it was with Blogger. I have to download the image and get it into the machine I’m writing on. Then it’s just copying the image to a source directory in the blog tree and adding one line to the Markdown file.
Yesterday, on Saturday I wrote the beginning of a Python script to automate running those commands. So far it handles it all up to running Emacs on the created file. Next will come updating the git repo locally then pushing up the changes.
The biggest down side at the moment is that the archives are organized in the single page view by date and year, but they aren’t physically organized in the real file tree. Also there’s no way to segment the blog into archive pieces. Generate, I think, rebuilds the whole site basically and, as the site grows, it’s taking a while to do a generate now. Okay, it takes 25 seconds but it seems like a long while.
As the archive grows to be years long, I believe it will become a big unweildy. It would be better if there was a way to segment off pieces of the archive, e.g., each year, so you don’t end up regenerating it all every time.
I’m actually pretty sure there is a way to do this, I’ll just have to dig it up when there’s time.