Thank you Nate for Obtvse!

I remember seeing Dustin Curtis’s Svbtle and drooling over it – I’d been searching for a blog engine for a long time now, having grown tired of WordPress, and was going to settle for Octopress.

Octopress is quite good – the advantage of serving up static HTML files is amazing, plus putting my blog entries in version control felt satisfying in a nerdly way. I’d always been interested Jekyll and seeing it mature into a blog platform like Octopress was really cool. However, my main gripe was that writing and generating the blog entries on multiple machines was a nightmare – they’d get overwritten each time and since I’m also using boxes with different timezones, the times would be all off as well. I’d have to remember to check in, commit, and push a draft, and then have to remove it when publishing. Way too frustrating.

So when I saw Svbtle on Hacker News, I knew this was exactly what I wanted. I always put off writing posts because I’d either have great ideas that I’d forget or never finish, so having the Drafts on one side and Published Posts on the other in the Admin panel just seemed like pure genius. The clean and simple writing interface was also a joy to work with, unlike the cluttered WordPress interface.

Imagine my sadness when I realized that Dustin was only opening it up to “vetted bloggers”, as I was surely not to fall within that pantheon. But that’s his right to do so, and I respect it even as I lamented the loss.

But Nate went ahead and cloned Svbtle for the masses, calling it Obtvse, and I’m ever thankful because otherwise I don’t think I’d be blogging. Long live open source, and a big shoutout of gratitude to Nate!