No longed bound to wordpress

For most of the time I’ve been blogging, I’ve used Wordpress. It’s very good software, but kind of requires somewhere to host it. Either on your own custom hosting, or wordpress.com. For a long time, I paid for my own hosting provider. But the times they are a changing, and I’m no longer prepared to pay for my own hosting.

Enter snow

Github provide a way of hosting a website, for free, it’s called Github Pages. Using a tool called Jekyll, it is possible to take a series of Markdown files and generate a static html website from them. The only drawback to Jekyll is that that it’s written in Ruby, it can be a pain to configure on Windows, and I’m primarily a windows kind of guy.

It’s also true that the vast majority of guides/tutorials out there for running a blog with Jekyll assume that you’ll be doing it on either a Mac or a Linux machine. I work entirely on Windows, and there is no way I’m going to try to configure Ruby on all the machines I use (or might use).

Sandra.Snow is written in C#, and uses Nancyfx to process the markdown into static html, exactly like Jekyll. I’m not sure about the name myself, but there you go.

Over the next few posts I’ll go over how I switched my blog from a hosted Wordpress to a staticly generated site using Snow.