Posterous is Dead. Long Live Github Pages and Jekyll
16 Feb 2013Posterous finally announced their expected demise, so I thought it was a good time to change where I wanted to host this and my other blogs.
There are so many options for blogging right now, so I thought I should figure out my requirements and go from there. The main ones are:
- Be able to completely customise the look and feel of the blog
- Simple editing (using Markdown if possible)
- Free hosting but can use a custom domain
- Be very nice to use a Git check-in to publish
I thought Tumblr might be my best option - and I have moved one of my blogs there - but then thought what would be nice is an offline blog creator which I could customise to my heart’s content and spat out static HTML pages that could be hosted anywhere.
I considered writing something myself, but then discovered Jekyll, a Ruby-based system that is used by Github Pages - which would be the perfect place to host this blog.
The setup was pretty straightforward on Windows once I’d got Ruby and the Ruby Development Kit installed.
Setting up the blog was also quite simple following the usage instructions, and even better there is already migration code to pull in content from existing blogs - even Posterous ones.
It didn’t take too much work to tweak the layouts to something I’m happy with, and even though I say it myself, this blog is now looking pretty swanky (well for someone with my limited design skills!)
If you want to see how it’s done, all of the code, content and layouts can all be seen in my Github account (naturally).
I’d definitely recommend this setup for migrating your Posterous blogs - assuming you’re happy hacking about with a little bit of code.