Jan Ouwens

“Java juggler”

2 minute read

Those of you who are subscribed to my blog (hi mom!) might have already noticed from the old posts that suddenly showed up again in Google Reader last night: I’ve switched blogging platforms. Again.

About half a year ago, I blogged about how awesome Telegram was. And still is, by the way. But I wasn’t really happy with it. It takes away the hassle of generating, uploading, and hosting the site. Which is a good thing! But I didn’t feel in control: every time I wanted something off the beaten path, it would be hard, or sometimes even impossible, to make it happen. Even though support issues are resolved quickly, it simply didn’t feel mature enough for me yet. I’m not interested in living on the bleeding edge; I just want something that works. Finally, I didn’t like the existing skins, and I don’t have the skill, or the time to learn the skill, to create a nice skin myself.

I started looking for something I could manage myself, and I quickly found Jekyll (famous for being used by GitHub) and Octopress. (Octopress is to Jekyll as LaTeX is to TeX.) These are nice platforms, but they’re written in Ruby. I’ve fallen out of love with Ruby hard, and I refuse to install RVM or anything like it on my pc. And I couldn’t get Octopress to run without it (although, to be honest, I didn’t try very hard).

Also, Octopress requires you to fork their project, put your data in the same repository as the code, and then do a merge whenever Octopress has an update. This, in my very humble opinion, is horrible. Simply horrible.

So Octopress was out.

And then I found PieCrust. It hasn’t officially reached version 1.0 yet, but already it feels much more complete and mature than Telegram. It’s written in PHP, which isn’t sexy, but it doesn’t have to be. The small issues that I ran into were dealt with swiftly by its creator, Ludovic Chabant. Also, the website and the software have a consistent cooking metaphor running through them, which always brings a smile to my face. In short: it has all the advantages of Telegram, plus a few things I was missing there.

So here it is: my website, baked with PieCrust. Yes, it looks like an Octopress site. I found the skin as a PieCrust template on Google somewhere, and I intend to replace it just as soon as I learn some proper design skills.