Octopress - A blogging framework for hackers

[microtonal]

Octopress is based on Jekyll, however, it is not exactly clear to me what it adds to Jekyll. Is it the extra plugins? Is it Rake-driven management?

Reading through the documentation quickly, it seems to add a lot of complexity compared to plain Jekyll.

A comparison with Jekyll sans Octopress would be appreciated!

[imathis]

Jeykll is a static generator which has simple support for blogging. If you get started with Jeykll, you still have to write all your own HTML, CSS, etc. Getting a Jekyll blog from just a generator to the point where it's something you'd be proud to post takes a good chunk of time and many developers don't want to deal with designing their blog.

Octopress is HTML, Sass, Javascript and a set of Rake tasks and plugins for Jekyll. It's a framework for the Jekyll blog generator. It has a 320 and up, responsive layout. Some plugins that make blogging easier.

Octopress isn't really any more complex than if someone set up a Jekyll blog for you and handed you the keys, but of course it's going to look complex when compared to a generator.

[masnick]

From whatI can tell from the git repository (https://github.com/imathis/octopress/), Octopress adds two major things to Jekyll: a bunch of automation (via the Rakefile) and a default theme.

Reading through the Rakefile, the automation actually looks pretty useful. For example, you can a new post with rake new_post["title here"] and Octopress will generate a properly named file for you with the correct yaml front matter.

I didn't look at what the default theme actually looks like, but looking through the code it appears to be useful in quickly getting a blog up. For example, it has a partial for integrating disqus comments out of the box.

[jparise]

This appears to be covered on the linked site itself:

Octopress is now based on mojombo/jekyll has been completely rewritten from the ground up with a mountain of goodies.

- A semantic HTML5 template

- A Mobile friendly responsive (320 and up) layout (rotate, or resize your browser and see)

- Built in 3rd party support for Twitter, Google Plus One, Disqus Comments, Pinboard, Delicious, and Google Analytics

- An easy deployment strategy using Github pages or Rsync

- Built in support for POW and Rack servers

- Easy theming with Compass and Sass

- A Beautiful Solarized syntax highlighting

[keenerd]

So what makes it for hackers? The Github backend? Including a plugin for code by default? http://redraftable.com is a blog engine for hackers, other than the author won't release sources while the project is still immature.

[mhansen]

The idea is that you can write your blog posts in your favorite coding editor instead of some web form. Some people find that easier - I certainly feel more at home in my editor.

[m_eiman]

Probably that it takes six pages of instructions to get it up and running.

[p4bl0]

I didn't knew about redradtable, it looks interesting, thanks for the link.

[Disclaimer: self advertisement follow ;-)]

I think that my own blogware fugitive[1] is by far more hacker-friendly than octopress. It only depends on git and it integrates completely in the normal git workflow by using hooks to generate static html from files. Also, the article files just contain their title (the first line of the file) and then the article itself. All the meta data are those from git: creation and modification dates, authors...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2799246

[imathis]

Octopress is a framework for Jekyll, which — like most static site generators — was built for hackers. Octopress is a well designed starting point for Jekyll blogging.

[egypturnash]

It's built around Git, you have to fiddle with the command line to post stuff. Those two things alone make it Not For End Users, at the very least.

[Mithrandir]

I guess it's supposed to be because you can post via the command line which, last time I checked, does not make you a hacker.

[wulczer]

If you're looking for blogging software for hackers, look at http://wingolog.org/software/tekuti/.

From the page:

  Tekuti means "I'm telling you" in Oshiwambo.
  It is weblog software written in Scheme, using Git as its persistent store.

'Nuff said.

[jamesjyu]

This is basically taking Stammy's tutorial and making it into a nice packaged framework: http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-wordpress-to-jekyll

Good show.

[pw]

I've been using Octopress for a few weeks now and really like it (I stumbled across it on github and started using the new version before it was released).

Static site generators are great, but you still have to do the design, which is a non-starter for a non-designer like myself. With Octopress I was able to get a great looking, Jekyll-powered blog up and rolling as easily as using Wordpress.

[gks]

I'm still a lot more impressed with the Python spinoff of Jekyll. It's called Hyde (http://www.github.com/hyde/hyde) and in my opinion a LOT more functional. I do wish that the documentation was a tiny bit more complete though.

If I were going to make a new site based on Jekyll, I'd seriously consider Hyde instead.

[pingswept]

I haven't tried Hyde, but I did switch to Blogofile (http://blogofile.com), another Python blog compiler, after trying Jekyll for a while.

[flocial]

I guess they never heard of Tokyo Promenade. It's a blogging engine implemented in C99 with no external dependencies on top of Tokyo Cabinet.

http://fallabs.com/tokyopromenade/

[gobr]

Promenade don't have a lovely orange octopus. :D

[alecbenzer]

This looks nice. :) Haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it looks very promising. I very recently built a jekyll blog, and while playing around with the CSS was fun and educational, my blog seems kind of shabby in comparison with wordpress blogs and the like, and I don't know if I'd be able to get my design skills up to the point where I'd be able to make my blog look that good.

The most surprising thing and biggest issue I can see right now is that there's "a" theme - I was expecting several. But I imagine that there will eventually be support for more (user-contributed) themes. I also like the syntax highlighting (I think pygments looks kind of ugly), although I'd also like to see more support for customizing the highlight appearance, like maybe removing the background.

[jamesu]

I'm not quite sure what this offers over jekyll apart from a few more tags and a slightly more opinionated deployment strategy.

I was half expecting a combination of the wordpress admin panel + jekyll backend (kind of like gollum except for blogs). Now that would have been imPRESSive.

[KarlFreeman]

I feel like I've unleashed a monster by posting this, personally I quite like the opinionated install for Jekyll especially the code plugin / view. Will be using it for my next blog install

[jonbro]

can someone summarize why I should move to this from Jekyll? The website is a bit unclear on that.

[ojilles]

I don't think you should. It's the work you did when you setup Jekyll that Octopress now has out of the box.

[imathis]

If you're already using Jekyll, you might consider moving to Octopress if you like the design, plugins, or rake tasks. It's MIT licensed, so if you would rather just snag those and integrate them into your existing blog that's fine too.

[imathis]

There's no official affiliation with Github. I started thinking through the branding for Octopress in 2009 when it first came out. I was looking for a good mascot and around the same time David Lanham did his 'Bubble Bay' design for a firefox campaign http://davidlanham.com/art/bubblebay/

I started thinking that an Octopus would be a great mascot. They're intelligent, flexible, and have loads of personality. And I asked David to do the artwork for the logo.

The 'press' part was taken from Wordpress, but mainly because I really like how subtly different it is from Octopus.

[Kwpolska]

Original jekyll is better.

[ristretto]

Hackers should write code, not blogs.

[pestaa]

And that code should be documented, right? A hacker-centric blog could be a good tool for that.