Today I relaunched my blog. I wanted to skip the Blogger platform for something more flexible for a long time and now I have finally made the switch. I examined a lot of Node blogging platforms and decided to go with DocPad. I looked at other alternatives such as Wheat and Blacksmith but the simplicity of DocPad really won me over. There is no database as everything is stored as files, documents can come in any format or shape and the community is very vibrant (as any Node community these days) just to name a few of the selling points. It is the perfect platform for blogs so the decision was not very hard.

The switch also gave me a chance of redesigning the blog entirely. I was previously using a very old version of Blogger since I did not want to convert the templates to the new Blogger format as I would much rather use a new platform and spend my time on migrating to that. I used Bootstrap for the styling but strongly considered trying something more OOCSS-like just for the experience. The blog is now responsive and looks great on all the devices I tested so far.

I also introduced Disqus as my comments framework. Previously I just used the built-in Blogger comments framework which worked but was not that exciting. So far I like Disqus although it has some quirks and some limits in regard to formatting.

The conclusion? I am pretty happy about the end result from more than one perspective. I have more control with my blog and the frameworks it uses. It is definitely a huge plus that my posts are now written as markdown documents removing (most) formatting and styling from the document itself leaving all styling to my templates and stylesheets. Overall a huge win, I would definitely consider DocPad for my future projects.