I’m going to try a few new things around here. The first will be writing (Ha!), and the second will be using Octopress to build a generated static blog.

If you know me as a web guy, you know that I’m predominantly a Drupal developer, but I’ve recently become interested in the idea of using something more lightweight, like Jekyll, to host my own site. My personal site doesn’t require web-based editing, or user accounts, or most of the other features that Drupal provides. I already do all of my writing in Markdown-capable editors like Textmate and Elements, so the ability to keep my posts file-based and manage them in a Git repository rather than a MySQL database makes sense for me.

I tinkered a bit with Jekyll on Github Pages (very cool, by the way), but decided to go with Octopress (a framework built on Jekyll) because of its terrific HTML5 stock theme. I’ll probably start making tweaks to it before long, but when it looks this good, there’s no need to be in a huge rush.

Beyond that, there are a few reasons I liked the idea of a static blog:

• No database queries or PHP processing mean pages are served more quickly without any caching systems required.

• No web front-end means eliminating an entry-point for possible security intrusions.

• Scalability. You know, just in case I ever get Fireballed.

• Now my site looks just like Matt Gemmell’s site, and that’s got to be a good thing (Good for me, at least. I can’t say it’ll help his reputation much.).