I’ve always wanted to be able to write my blog entries in Markdown, instead of using the Wordpress editor. What can I say, I really like Markdown. I had considered writing my own small blog engine that converted Markdown to HTML. But then there goes any free time I might have had. Plus, I would have to find a hosting provider. So, there my blog was stuck on Wordpress. Or so, I thought until I read a post by Phil Haack about converting his blog to run on GitHub pages.

After reading his post, I was pretty excited. The ability to write posts in Markdown. Using GitHub pages for free hosting. The whole site is statically generated, so if I needed to move to a paid hosting provider down the road, that would be easy. But then, I started reading up on both Jekyll and Octopress. They looked like they might be a pain to run on Windows (repeat, looked like, I didn’t try it, I’m probably wrong). They are written in Ruby, which I don’t have a ton of experience in. But I do a ton of JS development. So, I thought maybe there’s an equivalent to Jekyll and Octopress written in JS, using nodejs. So, I went searching…

Turns out there are a couple static site generators written using nodejs. (I won’t list them, I’m sure more will be created, such is the current state of the Node community) I found one I liked called Wintersmith. And you can see, my blog is now running on GitHub pages and was generated using Wintersmith. I’m quite happy with the results and quite enjoyed writing this post in MarkdownPad2. Also, enjoyed previewing my entire blog on my local machine using

wintersmith preview

I did not convert my old posts on Wordpress over to Wintersmith. Something for the next brave convert to Wintersmith, maybe. You can find my old posts at http://itsnull.wordpress.com/