Not long ago I swore off anything that required using a terminal on my Mac. Then, last night I did almost exactly the opposite and moved all 1686 blog posts from this nearly 12 year old Wordpress blog to Octopress.

No reason, other than it sounded like fun.

A number of smart bloggers have been pushing ”baked blogs” and I love the idea, but not for many of the reasons they cite as so important.

One argument for having a baked blog is that if it gets “Fireballed” (we used to call that “Slashdotted”) the server won’t get buried under the load. For most of us, that’s not a concern. Almost no one reads this. Besides, several decent and easy-to-configure Wordpress plugins have the performance issues mostly solved anyway.

Honestly, I wanted to do it because serving up a completely static site using nothing but a simple web server is a neat way to do it - almost retro in a way. It just feels clean somehow. No database, no PHP/Rails/Whatever. I can serve the site from anywhere, including S3, Github pages, Heroku, all with a simple configuration change and minor setup time.

And besides, Matt Gemmell wrote up such a nice article about the process that I figured even I could do it. I was right. It took about two hours to convert the Wordpress XML export and massage things into shape. Octopress makes using Jekyll easy. I had no intention of starting with a bare Jekyll install. Too complicated.

Anyway, this is new. I’m using the out of the box template but that will change when I have time.

Onward!

UPDATE 11/08/2011: That lasted less than a month. A static blog is cool, but a pain in the ass to maintain overall. Images are tough to deal with. Plus it takes Jekyll like 8 minutes to rebuild everything each time I want to change something. Life’s too short. Maybe whatever Marco Arment is working on will be worth a look.