I have been wondering for a while now about what I should do with my iPhone apps blog. It gets a fair amount of hits at around 5,500 uniques per month which I consider to be fairly good considering I don’t update it any where near as much as I should. I write for the site when I get a chance and mostly it’s just little bits of information I’ve picked up along the way when developing apps, and also there’s a few tutorials which seem to go down well.

But I needed to do something with the site as it was looking very tired and runs on Wordpress so has a dependency on a database when mostly the content is static. Enter Octopress.

Reasons for switching

There are a number of reasons why I switched blogging platform. Here they are in no particular order.

• Wordpress => Octopress

  Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing again PHP like some people seem to, but I realised that I should probably give some other things a try. That’s where I found the lovely Octopress. It’s a blogging framework built on top of Jekyll and all written in Ruby. I get the benefit of trying out Ruby which I have to say is very nice.

• Database backed => Static files

  It’s pretty obvious that a website which is just a bunch of static files is going to outperform a database backed one. Also, if your database goes down for any reason or gets overloaded then you’re in trouble if it’s powering your site also. I now have no dependency on a database so all my database now does is host my DNS records (which to be fair, should also probably be in flat files).

• HTML => Markdown

  Writing my blog meant that I had to use Wordpress’s HTML editor or copy and paste into it from outside. This was going OK but I had been using Markdown for some other things and realised it would be really nice to be able to write my blog using it. Thankfully, Octopress uses it and so I am writing this post in TextWrangler in Markdown and I can say it’s much nicer!

Where have the comments gone?

There is only one problem I came across when switching and that is comments. Since this site is now 100% static, I don’t have any comments. There are options such as Disqus but I realised that I simply don’t need them. If people want to get in contact with me then the best way is to tweet me or email me.

The future

I hope that since it’s a lot easier for me to write a blog entry now then I shall do more of it and perhaps some more tutorials as well.