I have changed the blogging engine for this blog once again. This blog was on Drupal for a while, then on Octopress (Jekyll), and now on Sculpin. I was never unhappy with either of them—I just enjoy playing around with new stuff every once in a while.
This blog is now a custom Sculpin thing. There is a blog skeleton available to get you started, but I thought I would roll my very own with some heavy inspiration from the skeleton. I also wanted my "theming" to be custom so I could play with new shiny things like Gulp.
I probably spent the most time monkeying around with Gulp. I hadn't used Gulp before and I only had a weak grasp of Grunt, so there was some learning to be done there. I got it working great with Browsersync, Bourbon and sourcemaps. All sweet stuff that I will write more blog posts about.
Using Sculpin is really easy. I never really touched any PHP code other than pasting a little code into SculpinKernel.php to enable redirects via mavimo's Sculpin Redirect Bundle. So all I had to do was create some .html files with Twig syntax to render my markdown files. I could migrate the .md files from Jekyll format pretty easily—I just had to remove the Octopress-specific image tags I had in my markdown.
As a PHP developer I feel much more at home with Sculpin than I did with Octopress and Jekyll. Neither are that hard to use, but I really like how Sculpin is simple and doesn't do too many things I don't need.
The only downside to Sculpin over Jekyll is that hosting the site on Github Pages is a little harder. It is still totally doable, but you have to commit the generated content for Github to be able to serve the pages. I simply chose to just push the generated files to my VPS.
If you are curious about Sculpin and how this blog is created, you can check out my Github repository for naxoc.net.