Wordpress has been my blogging platform for the last two years, and Drupal for a few years before that. Both are written in PHP and both were installed and maintained on a traditional shared hosting account. I would have stuck with Wordpress if it weren’t for it’s lack of robust Markdown language support. Writing a coder’s blog requires code samples, usually in multiple languages. Github’s flavor of Markdown has proved to be an excellent language for authoring content that includes code samples, and Octopress supports it by default.
Octopress is a wrapper around Jekyll, and Jekyll is well suited for publishing a blog to a Github’s Pages service. Since Jekyll only generates a static site, it can be much faster than a PHP solution like Wordpress or Drupal. When used in conjunction with the Atom text editor, Octopress becomes a powerful blogging platform.