As a developer using Emacs, I've taken the following as prerequisites:

1. Blog source in org-mode format.
2. Github Page or similar static blog hosting sites (e.g. Heroku).

And what actually makes a blog site?

Articles linked in a website-way: uniform theme, front page, navigator, catogories and etc.

So naturally a static site generator would be sufficient. For the record, one year ago I used my own self-hosted wordpress, which is easier to use but as a developer I found I know too little and it was an overkill solution for a blog.

About choosing the right static site generator, I've found StaticGen, which is a ranking site to static site generators as DistroWatch.com to Linux/BSD distributions. I was using Octopress. Two potential candidates are Jekyll, which is what's used by Github Page and Hexo, ranked as the third, a nodejs based generator that seems to be compatible with Octopress. I'm interested in Hexo as recently I've started a project using nodejs-webkit, another story.

Other successful stories on org-mode-related blogs have suggested: Blogofile, Pelican and Nikola.

This site was using Octopress and some of my posts here are about configuring Octopress. Octopress is not hard to use. As a complete beginner, it took me about two days to setup up the blog (with Org-octopress), and by the third I was able to play with the source to add some small new features. The issue with Octopress is that it feels like Rails: convenient, powerful and highly-customizable, but as a newbie the learning curve is steep. I don't feel I understand the structure at all and lost in features…

So maybe another time for Octopress. To learn more, I decided to go with the old KISS: use simple/single-purpose tools and chain them together.

The choice is Jekyll, which Octopress claims to base on. This article is very helpful in making this decision. The breakdown steps in that article help me understand the missing pieces from Org files to Jekyll site:

1. Jekyll handles Markdown natively, but it also can deal with HTML with special headers (YAML Jekyll header).
2. Org-publish export org files to HTML format.
3. Insert the required header to the exported HTML files and put the result files in Jekyll directory. It's DONE!

And it turns out there are many Emacs packages deal with these steps. I choose org2jekyll for its simplicity and separation of Org header and Jekyll header.

An afternoon is all it takes to finish the migration. Yep, I lose some features like comments, tag cloud and etc, but I also understand the insides much clearer. I plan to add back features step by step with more confidence!

org2jekyll is the bridge between Org and Jekyll. There are some issues I'd like to see fixed and features to be implemented. Now I can focus on "simple" components like Jekyll, org2jekyll and org-publish. This kind of clarity and confidence didn't come out from many weeks working with Org and Org-octopress: too many levels of abstractions impede understanding. Maybe some day I'll be back to Octopress for its strength, but surely after I've learned more with the KISS ^_^