I’m happy to own a shiny new Octopress based blog now. It is as lean and simple, yet comfortable as it possibly can get: cms-free, git-based, markdown syntax, and with web-based editing comfort.

The articles below were both inspiring and essentially helpful for setting everything up:

• How to build CMS-free Websites with Github Pages and Jekyll
• How trunk club moved to Octopress + Prose + Github + Travis CI

Further am I now convinced that this is the utmost perfect and one and only acceptable solution you should ever build a blog with ;–)

Ingredients

The basic ingredients for such a beautiful blogging platform are:

• git for version control
• github pages for hosting
• markdown for syntax
• octopress for structure / template / plugins / workflow
• travis-ci for automatically publishing changes
• prose.io for online editing (optional)

Further Links and Documentation

Everything you need to know (documentation wise) for taming octo-blogs like these:

• Official Octopress Docs
• Octopress Wiki: 3rd Party Plugins
• The Jekyll Docs
• Prose Wiki: Getting Started
• Writing in Markdown Syntax
• Help with Github Pages

Workflow

The workflow for creating and publishing posts is:

1. clone repo and check out the source branch (never edit master directly!)
   • git clone git@github.com:tknerr/tknerr.github.io.git
   • git checkout source
2. create / edit the posts
   • rake new_post["some title"]
   • vi source/_posts/YYYY-MM-DD-some-title.markdown
3. preview your changes
   • rake generate (first time only, or whenever layout or config changes)
   • rake preview & (or start /B rake preview on windows)
4. deploy changes
   • git add . && git commit -m "add new blog post about foo"
   • git push origin source
   • wait a minute for travis-ci to regenerate and deploy the site

More details here.