I’m catching up with some of my items in the feed reader and stumbled upon this post. Let me know if you need some help with Jekyll or Octopress. I use both extensively and have highly customized them (that, and security benefits, were the main reasons why I switched away from WordPress). Our company blog runs on a custom version of Jekyll that compiles some pages to PHP versions, my own blog (written in German) uses a basic Octopress layout, but I changed a lot of things under the hood and made the whole thing linked-list aware. Both sites are completely different and it shows how flexible those little static site generators are.

I talked (again, unfortunately in German) about my revamped writing workflow in the Sosumi Show with @Zettt (link). I’ve written / modified two scripts that get called from MarsEdit. I call the latter via the standard bookmarklet; everything I need (title, date, category, url) gets prefilled. My script has a very basic way of handling my own custom header from MarsEdit (because the Blosxom API doesn’t allow categories), so that I can easily set everything in plain text without ever seeing what’s done under the hood. On my server I periodically run a script that checks for new posts and then compiles a new version of the site. It doesn’t rely on file system events, instead it checks for the file modification date which is quite inexpensive. It just recompiles the site if there are some newer files. This way you can run it on every crontab-aware server. Everything gets synced over a second Dropbox account that has one shared folder with my main one. This setup also gives me the flexibility that I can create a new text file on any Dropbox-supported text editor on iOS. I have set up two TextExpander snippets for my post types (linked list item, regular article). I’ve also the benefits of writing in Markdown (previously I ran a Markdown plugin on my WordPress site so that the migration wasn’t that painful; it took me a weekend nonetheless).

I haven’t published anything of this yet, because it is highly adapted to my needs. But let me know if you need some help or if you’re interested in parts of my workflow. Some things like the cronjob script should be generic enough.