After a very short period running Orchard for my blog, I decided to reverse course and try out wintersmith instead.
Orchard seemed like a natural fit for me when I started out. Open source, free, .NET-based, and installed with one click from Azure’s dashboard. I figured I’d spend some time with it, tweak it a bit, make it my own… But then, I didn’t. I had zero desire to play with it. For my needs, it was far too heavyweight, like peeling a potato with a sword.
Enter wintersmith. It’s a node.js variant of Jekyll. Posts are composed as markdown files in a folder structure, with Jade templates to determine the layout. And right out of the box, it looks nice. Editing .md files with the Web Essentials extension to Visual Studio is a joy as you can see what the changes will look like every time you press save.
The blog is hosted on Azure following these steps. My blog is now code on github. I like it.