I’ve been one of the main member of the Subtext project, but lately I’ve been lagging behind keeping a consistent posting blogging schedule, and I’ve also realized that this is partially due to the fact that the blogging platform I’m using is kind of obsolete, not in line with the latest “trends” in blogging and site taxonomies.

Since this is a open-source project, actually my open-source project, I could technically tweak the code and add the features I need, but the technology behind the blog engine, despite the effort done in the last few years, is kind of outdated, and not fun to work with. So I’m planning on moving to another blog engine.

Wordpress

First option I looked into was obviously WordPress. I’m already using it for my robotics/arduino blog, but despite being so easy to use and full of themes, I’d still want something I can tweak if needed, and I’m definitely not going to start writing code in PHP.

Dexter

I’ve then also looked into using Dexter, wrote by my friend Ugo Lattanzi… but also this project, while pretty active some time ago, has now gone dormant (as you can also see by the fact his developer moved to wordpress), thus having the same issue of Subtext: I don’t have time to be a main contributor.

Github Pages and Jekyll

Another option I’ve evaluated is to move to Github Pages and using the static pages blog generator Jekyll, exactly like Phil Haack (founder of Subtext) did when he moved out from Subtext a few weeks ago. But… it’s a static code generator, which means that your site is a bunch of html files, and that you need to keep a local version of your site on the machine you want to write a post from. Also if you want to use plugins, you have to generate the site locally because Github won’t generate pages using custom plugins. And additionally if you want to write a plugin you have to write it with Ruby, which I don’t know and personally I’m not very eager to learn.

Ghost

I’ve always been a JavaScript developer since I started working in this industry in 1996 and lately I’ve been working with it on my spare time on OpenROV and also at work on mobile applications with PhoneGap. So the natural language would be Node.js.

And it just happened that a kind of big project for a Node.js blog engine has been launched: Ghost.

It has the features I wanted, like markdown editing, plugin architecture (well, not implemented yet), very easy theme API, and moreover it can be installed pretty easily on Azure Web Sites by just using a few git commands. And in case I want to tweak the code or add some functionalities, it’s pretty easy to do so.

So far I’ve installed the latest version on a test site on Azure Web Sites, http://codeclimber-ghost.azurewebsites.net/ and I’ll try and see how development goes on before doing the actual migration.

Next steps

In the meanwhile, not matter what platform I decided to move to, I need to get content out of Subtext and unfortunately none of the target blogging engine supports BlogML. For the moment I’m going to write a Subtext to WXR export tool. And probably I’d need to think of some kind of redirect method to keep the old URLs for SEO purposes.

And will try to keep you updated with my progress on trying Ghost and on moving the blog.

What do you think?