WordPress → Aegea → DocPad

Recently I’ve remade this blog for the third time.

The first version was made on WordPress in 2008. I used my homepage’s design and was just experimenting with blogging.

In 2012 I became tired of WordPress’s inconvenience to write about coding. You have to use HTML to markup simple text and inserting code examples is even harder.

So I tried Aegea. Aegea has the best blog UI. You can’t imagine better engine if you just want to write and don’t want to think about geeky stuff.

But in 2013 I became tired again. Aegea wasn’t the best engine for coder’s blog. Strange archaic wiki-like text formatting. The same dances with tambourine to add code example. And I became terribly jealous of people who stored their blogs’ content on GitHub in Markdown files and received pull requests with useful fixes.

So I spent few days to replace Aegea for DocPad. It was much simpler than I thought and I like the result very much. DocPad is a static site generator. And it’s much more flexible than WordPress and Aegea.

Now I can write text using the simplest format available (Markdown) in the best text editor (iA Writer). Then share drafts on Draft. Then copy file to local blog repository, add simple YAML header (title, tags, etc.), commit it, push to GitHub and deploy to server (using Fabric).

Good parts

• Markdown everywhere.
• The simplest code examples posting.
• “Read more” (was impossible in Aegea).
• Single repository for both English and Russian languages.
• All content can be edited on GitHub or prose.io.
• Static HTML: extremely fast, can be hosted everywhere.
• Very easy to change layout or content (compared to WordPress and Aegea).
• It works exactly as I want.

P. S. Read the source, Luke!