
Octopress - A blogging framework for hackers - KarlFreeman
http://octopress.org/
======
danieldk
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.

~~~
ojilles
I'm using Jekyll, and it took me roughly 3 nights to get it all up and
running. Now looking at Octopress, they've literally done a couple of things I
did myself to Jekyll (new post rake task, uploading to production, etc. etc.)
So if I'd start from scratch today, I would take a good look at Octopress
indeed.

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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.

~~~
officemonkey
Hell, if you were a real hacker, you would ssh to your server with vim or
emacs, write the post in markdown or somesuch, and have your the blosxom-
inspired clone you wrote yourself serve up the HTML.

The real reason it's "for hackers" is for marketing. That and improving its
chances for a front-page mention here.

~~~
imathis
The tagline has nothing to do with Hacker News, the fact that you would even
say that is amusing.

~~~
sathyabhat
It's got nothing to do with HN, true, but "X blog engine for Hackers!!!11"
grabs more eyeballs than "x blog engine"

~~~
chriseppstein
Those damn marketers. Going after that _HUGE_ hacker market again!!!

~~~
pestaa
Funny and deserved an upvote, but in reality I bet hackers are more willing to
invest in tools they find good. Still, it wouldn't describe the market size of
course, but the worthiness of pursuing it.

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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.

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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.

~~~
gks
The really nice thing that I personally like about Hyde is the fact that it is
very component based. For example, it uses Jinja2 for templating. Which is
extremely similar to Django templates. It really is a nice little setup that
let's me do some neat things very easily. Very powerful.

Another thing I like is that Hyde will regen only the files needed to be
regenerated. You can of course force a full regeneration of the site, but as
your site grows (particularly blogs) the slower regeneration gets. This means
that for simple things like adding a new post to the site can mean very quick
regeneration.

Jekyll is certainly an inspiration, but it seems to be lagging behind in basic
functionality of some other more interesting projects.

------
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

~~~
flocial
Sad but true. Octopi can make or break a project.

[http://thechangelog.com/post/1156862826/octobot-java-
scala-r...](http://thechangelog.com/post/1156862826/octobot-java-scala-
rabbitmq-beanstalk-redis-task-queue)

~~~
markkanof
All octopus jokes aside, thanks for pointing out The Changelog podcast. I had
not heard of this one before and it looks like they cover a lot of great
topics.

~~~
flocial
I found it via GitHub's "Explore" section which is also a gem.

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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.

------
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.

~~~
wickedchicken
"TCP/IP won because we focused on writing the software, not the documentation"
- Vint Cerf [1]

Hackers write code. If you write code _and_ documentation, you're an engineer,
good programmer, etc.

Think about what you are you saying when you're "hacking on some code" -- you
are intentionally writing code that is bad, but cleverly bad enough to get the
job done. "Thoroughly documented hacks" are about as nonsensical as F. Scott
Fitzgerald exquisitely writing about how great it feels to take a piss.

[1] While I really want to get this confirmed from the man himself, this is
unfortunately sourced from a twitter post and not entirely verifiable at the
moment: <http://twitter.com/#!/pcalcado/statuses/74071761897005056>

~~~
drdaeman
I believe he meant that IP won over, say, X.25 because OSI stack was
overcomplicated. In a same way SMTP (67-page RFC) won over X.400 (a huge
book).

Hackers think, write code and _then_ they may consider to document something
about it. This is in contrast to engineers, who think, document then implement
things.

