Today I moved my blog content from Squarespace to Octopress. Octopress touts itself as “a blogging framework for hackers”, and rightly so. After poking around the framework file hierarchy, administration compared to Squarespace is a lot easier for a number of reasons:

  1. Octopress is run from the command-line and a text editor. It’s a lot faster to post, edit, and tweak the styling and features compared Squarespace’s web interface.

  2. Version control through git. Squarespace does offer version control now as well, however if you use it you have to create your own templates from scratch—there’s no happy medium.

  3. Open source. There’s an active community behind Octopress pushing plugins and themes.

  4. Markdown files. Squarespace offers export functionality, however the single export option is Wordpress. I can’t export text files for personal use, so I am moving the content over by hand one post at a time. With Octopress I am simply pushing commits with the markdown files to my Github repo.

Don’t get me wrong, Squarespace is great if you need an “out of the box” website solution—not to mention, their customer support is first class. However, now I have complete control of my content and how it’s displayed, and it feels good!

These instructions were helpful in getting started with Octopress:

And I’m using the Greyshade theme from Shashank Mehta.