This is my inaugural, requisite post on my personal blog.
I have chosen to run my blog with Octopress rather than WordPress or Blogger. Why? This blogger and this blogger do a good job of explaining. Not only does Octopress allow me to source control the entire blog, but also lets me very easily host the site using GitHub Pages.
The guide here does a great job of explaining setting up Octopress on GitHub. While I am using GitHub to host the static content I wanted to use my own custom domain. Following the instructions here to create a CNAME file and then adding a simple “CNAME Record” (an alias) on GoDaddy was all it took for blog.alexrothberg.com to direct to cancan101.github.io.
Simplifying the URL
The default behavior for Octopress is to put the blog content in the /blog/ subdirectory in the URL. Since I am using a subdomain for my namespacing, this proved to be awkward. The URLs started with: http://blog.alexrothberg.com/blog/. This post offers an easy solution. I also found this GitHub Issue discussing the issue. You can see changes I made here. When done with the edits I also had to run rake update_source.