markdown powered blogs

Switching from a complex blogging platform to a lightweight, file-based blog is something of a trend amongst web developers lately. I chalk it up to our love of simple solutions, and a preference of interfacing directly with a file-system. I much prefer to open up SublimeText2, go into distraction free mode and create a markdown file for a new article. For me it's a smaller barrier of entry to writing than logging into Worpress and gathering my thoughts in a <textarea>.

##what's out there

There are some great options out there for markdown based blogs. My preference is towards node.js, and Wheat (created by Tim Caswell) as a platform for howtonode.org is one of the more popular solutions in that category. Blacksmith is another great solution, created by nodejitsu. Both are interesting and powerful solutions, but weren't exactly what I wanted.

##javascript is easy

I wanna be in control of the urls for articles, use the templating engine I prefer, and have some fun writing javascript. I also want to be able to start my blog up locally on a node http server to tweak it and test it, and not have to generate the static site to view every change. For the live site, I want to just clone a git repo on a server, and run > node generate.js to create a static site for Apache to serve. So I did, it was fun. Feel free to check it out, maybe fork it and see what you think.

##i can haz dropbox blog?

Check out what Joe Hewitt is doing to integrate Dropbox into his blogging solution. I dig it.