Goodbye, Octopress!

When I started this blog 13 years ago*, I went with Octopress, a framework built on top of Jekyll with nice defaults. It had some features built-in that would have required various plugins in Jekyll, and I remember being quite happy about it.

Unfortunately it didn’t last long, and its maintainer quickly abandoned it: the last commit is from February 2016. I kept it for a while because it still worked, although I had more and more issues due to several dependencies not supporting the latest versions of Ruby.

In the meantime, Jekyll continued to evolve while I was stuck forever with Octopress. I wanted to move to Jekyll, but nowadays I have little time for side-projects, and I’d prefer to work on ‘useful’ things rather than spend a lot of time migrating the blog from one stack to another, adapting plugins and custom code.

Well, nowadays painful migrations are not a problem anymore: I asked Claude Code to do it, and less than five minutes later it was done. Something that would have taken me various evenings was done in a few minutes. I do want to understand the code I generate with Claude Code or Codex, but in the present case the goal was to actually remove as much code as possible to use Jekyll’s defaults.

Will this be a new start for this blog? Maybe, let’s see.

(*): It was not my first blog; before that I wrote a few posts in French in 2011–2012.