Wordpress is the undisputed king of the blog engines, but he’s getting fat and bloated, sitting on that throne of his. I recently created an e-commerce website out of a Wordpress installation – honestly, is there anything Wordpress can’t do with the right plugin?

But let’s face it: using Wordpress is hard work.

Migrating from one URL to another is a pain and requires digging into the database itself. Updates come regularly but backups are more trouble than it’s worth. Yes, there’s probably a plugin for that, but I expect backups to be a standard feature, not an add-on. On top of this, you have to be online to write and I’m not always in range of wifi. Granted, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do these things, but this particular rocket scientist has better things to do with his time, like actually write a blog post.

Boy was I ecstatic when I found out about Octopress.

• It’s deadbeat simple.
• I get to use my favourite tools: the terminal and vi.
• It uses markdown so I don’t have to think about formatting.
• It has responsive CSS so it looks beautiful on my phone (Android, of course).
• It backs itself up onto github with a cronjob.
• It looks way sexy in black.

If you’re not afraid of the command line, go give Octopress a try. If you’re 99% of the population that can’t understand geek-speak, stick with Wordpress. In the meantime, I’ll go ahead and brag about how this self-hosted blog costs me $0.01 per month to run.