I read about blogcast in my news stream today and it looked like just what I was looking for:

• Lightweight and quick to install
• Uses Rails 3 so lets me get my hands dirty on that for the first time
• Allows me to embed code into my postings and auto syntax highlights them using highlight.js

So lets get this thing going:

First of all I downloaded the blogcast zip from Tian Davis' website, extracted it into my Projects folder and started up the rails server. 5 minutes later I had this blog up and running locally - sweet!

Markdown?

Blogcast uses markdown. I've not had a huge amount of experience with that although I have played with it a little. There is a great reference to all the commands on Daring fireball. Here are a few I think I will be using significantly:

# heading   - this is a h1
## this is a h2
* unordered list item
1. Ordered list item

WMD Editor

Blogcast uses the wmd-editor. Which gives a few handy shortcuts for editing blog posts.

ctrl-k     - insert code
ctrl-l     - insert link
ctrl-b     - make **bold**