So I changed my blog again.

I think all the changes I end up doing to it follow a pattern. It keeps getting simpler.

The first iteration I made, which was a self developed and self hosted blog, was started because I wanted to be more proficient with Ruby on Rails. I built it from scratch and learned a lot about complex ActiveRecord relations. Internally it had a complex admin zone,with URL shortening and even image galleries. The posts were done in Textile markup. It was good and by all means useful to me. But then, like with your two year old smartphone, it happened. I was fed up with it. And because of that I ended up writing less.

So I started a new version of it, but now with Octopress. The idea was fascinating to me: using a repository to have all my posts stored in Markdown, and static pages generation. I was able to store it directly on GitHub pages, as the content was statically generated. I had to extract all the posts, tags and links from the old one, so I programmed an extraction script that translated everything to markdown with the correct file naming and formatting requirements of the platform. I grabbed a free theme and I modified it to my liking, I added more modules and a few plugins of my own, tinkered a bit with the CSS and had a good time. But, as always, I grew up tired of it. It gave me a few headaches with ruby dependencies and a broken deploy function was the trigger of its demise.

For quite some time I wanted to check out Ghost. And for quite some other time I wanted to try DigitalOcean. So why don't do both?

So I got my hands dirty and extracted all the posts from Octopress and populated the JSON format Ghost uses, with a custom made script, of course.

For the time being I'm pretty satisfied. Let's see how it ends - but I am pretty sure of the outcome.