Owning Your Content

From Andre Torrez’s post What I Want To Read About:

Jekyll is a “blog-aware, static site generator” that has been around for over three and a half years. The idea is that you don’t need a centralised blog posting service to generate and host your static files, you can have them generated locally and pushed to a static web server.

and

These “own your content” apps are still in the toothpick and wad of gum stages, but someone is going to get this right and it’s not just going to be a great story but a new way of thinking about how we publish and own our content.

Last year I moved my blog from WordPress to Octopress, a static blogging system built on top of Jekyll. Thanks to the excellent documentation by the developer, Brandon Mathis, I was able to get things up and running in just a few hours. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t exactly easy, either. It was, however, definitely worth it. Aside from the technical benefits of running your site from static files —- it’s faster, more stable, and more secure —- it just feels better, less abstracted.

I’m really looking forward to seeing where these tools go in the next year. I haven’t been this excited about blogging since the early days of Edit This Page.