I used to blog on wordpress.com. After a year or so, I finally decided to abandoned it and switched to Octopress + Github Pages. Here are the reasons and how I migrated to Octopress. Maybe because I was using wordpress.com, and those who use a self-hosted wordpress have something different to say, the way I see it, wordpress, at least wordpress.com, sucks.
Use your favorite editor? No-no
I am an Vim addict and I almost use Vim for everything (except for watching
videos perhaps). It's extremely uncomfortable using the dumb text input frame
embedded in web page. Besides, I often need to insert inlining code or code block
in blogs. For inline code, I have to use plain text mode and wrap them using the
html <code> tag manually. And for code blocks, I have to use the stupid,
unportable [sourcecode] tag.
When I realized that awful experience even cool down my passion for blogging, I know it's time to change.
With Octopress, I can use Vim to compose blogs locally. For formating, Markdown did a decent enough job. I'm more than happy with these.
Page loading speed
In Wordpress, everything is stored in database, and the page is generated dynamically when you request it. Despite those caching plugins, why bother dynamic anyway when static pages are just good enough?
Using Google's PageSpeed Insights for measurement, my old blog site hosted in wordpress.com got 78 out of 100 score, while this blog got 91 out of 100. Hooray!
Migration
Jekyll offers several ways to migrate your previous blogs. Octopress is based on Jekyll, so all these ways also apply. I found the Exitwp tool extremely usefully for migrating wordpress blogs. One drawback of Exitwp is it can not handle non-ascii characters so a few of my previous blogs written in Chinese can not be migrated using it.