Several months ago I was pretty amazed with the ability of blogging through a static pages generator that was open source and had a nice name: Octopress. Some time later I am still quite delighted with another analogous tool that is also open source but has a less fancy name: Jekyll.

Jekyll is the foundation for Octopress and what made me change to it at first was that GitHub encourages it. Such encouragement comes along with the promise of painless integration with GitHub pages.

I’ve took an while without updating the Octopress blog and get back to the labor seemed pretty tough – since I wanted to spend no time with configuration nor stuff like that. After acknowledging GitHub inclination to Jekyll I’ve also read a blog post comparing the two blogging tools and this entry in the Octopress blog which is not that comforting.

So the choice was made. Time to move on and get the life going on again.

Moving out

First thing was following up the step-by-step guide for deploying Jekyll with GitHub pages provided by GitHub. Easy peasy.

It was sad to verify that my CNAME configuration messed with the CSS, which had to be also statically provided. Configuring the Jekyll options did the trick and style rules were finally working. I’ve had already suffered a lot with that on Octopress and this suffering probably done my life easier nowadays.

Next thing was to import the old posts from the former Octopress blog. I was annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t find the markdown files anymore. The only thing that occurred to me was that GitHub neglected the posts since they lived in a folder named _posts. (I’ve imaginatively created this rule of GitHub behavior)

After coming and going around a lot and trying an HTML to Markdown tool, I’ve finally rediscovered that there was a branch named source in the Octopress repository – and all the markdown stuff was still there!

Since I’ve used the same git repository to introduce the new Jekyll blog, the rediscovering made me seek for and find one awesome git feature that I wasn’t aware of: checkout files from a different branch.

$ git checkout source -- source/_posts

And my posts were mine again!

Moreover

Another thing that impressed me is how seamlessly is the generation of HTML from the markdown files. That is probably accomplished by the github-pages gem but I haven’t dived deep on it yet. Maybe another time.