
Jekyll Bootstrap: The Quickest Way to Blog with Jekyll - nreece
http://jekyllbootstrap.com/
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apsurd
I'm the maintainer of jekyll-bootstrap, nice to see this on HN!

My main focus is super-fast publishing (GitHub Pages) and technical blogging.
I really could use some honest user feedback from technically-minded bloggers.
What is most important to you? What features do you need to see?

I'm prioritizing API development. Simple and standardized api's put Open
Source projects on the map imo. On that note I'm working on a theme and
javascript api for JB.

Theme api allows designers to (easily) contribute great themes. This includes
syntax highlighting (which is not themed yet =[)

Javascript plugin API will allow your blog to stretch its wings - arbitrary
3rd-party integration, optimizing content form (tabs, accordion, slides, etc)
and..

I want to rollout a jekyll-blog network where users can log in, "follow",
"like" etc just how tumblr, posterous, wordpress all have community
integration.

Please let me know what is important to you. Thanks for your support!

~~~
CJefferson
My main interest for 'quick technical blogging' would be nice and easy code
formatting (C++ in my case), which seems to be irritatingly difficult in my
blogging systems.

Not sure if that is the kind of comment you are interested in. How would I put
some C++ code into a blog post?

~~~
apsurd
Sadly I'm not familiar with C++ but yes this is definitely the feedback I'm
looking for. I would imagine kickass, painless, and beautiful syntax
highlighting would go a long long way for technical blogs. This is something I
want to (but haven't yet) dedicate a lot of focus on assuming it would
motivate more programmers to publish content.

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LogicX
Can you give us a breakdown/comparison to Octopress
(<http://www.octopress.org>)?

Which I use for <http://www.MikeSchroll.com> and seems to have many similar
goals (and also can be easily deployed to github pages, which is where I host
mine)

~~~
apsurd
(I maintain jekyllboostrap) Two main differences:

1) The core implementation difference is that Octopress is customized through
Jekyll plugins whereas JB is customized through native liquid code.

2) JB's purpose is to build a standardized API for Jekyll Blogs. Octopress has
no such api.

1) Has a few consequences. Since GitHub Pages does not run any plugins,
Octopress basically pre-processes your website and then pushes the final
rendered pages to GitHub for hosting. JB is able to just push your change
itself and GitHub takes care of the Jekyll processing. This has a couple
advantages. Firstly your codebase is cleaner (I'm a developer and that
mattered to me =x) and secondly for larger blogs (imagine 1k posts) you are
basically letting GitHub do all the work rather than preprocessing it
yourself.

TBH the plugin thing has become something of a debate with me. I originally
_challenged_ myself to not use plugins because I just wanted to make a damned
blog, I didn't see why Liquid needed to be so damned difficult. So I'd thought
I'd save other people the hassle of figuring out liquid. But I can see how
people don't mind hosting a pre-processed website if it means getting what
they want.

2) The plugin problem highlights the need for a stadardized api. It's very
easy to use plugins to do everything you want for your blog. But your work
doesn't benefit the larger community because there is not an established
integration point for plugins. Jekyll is like 4 years old and there are a ton
of plugins but nobody cares because its _still_ too hard to get up and
running. You need to read the docs for _every single plugin_ to integrate it.
Jekyll community is segmented exactly because of plugins imo.

With JB my (technical) goal is to build a common API for Jekyll-based blogs.
An api for themes will mean plug-n-play theming. An api for javascript will
mean badass javascript plugins that _drop in_. Ideally I'd like to make
community support (js widget that allows people to follow, like, vote,
explore, blogs etc).

Octopress supports nor advocates no such api. It has a (very nice) theme but
no theme API so you can't just install a theme.

Honestly I think Octopress is a lot more fine-tuned _at this point_. But I'm
trusting that once the APIs are solidified, you will see a larger community
developed around the JB framework which collectively means everyone's
experience will only improve.

I'd say stick with Octopress if you are comfortable customizing it to fit your
needs. Go with JB if your main goal is to run a technical blog and
(eventually) benefit from "JB community" improvements, themes, js plugins,
etc.

Btw Brandon Mathis (<https://github.com/imathis>) has given me great advice on
how he promoted octopress and made it into what it is today so I definitely
take inspiration and respect his work =).

~~~
LogicX
Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough reply. I only recently started using
Jekyll/Octopress, had I known or yours I would've checked it out at the time;
but yea - I think I'll stick with Octopress for now.

I do hear you though on the precompile vs github doing it -- I struggled a lot
at first with the Octopress directions, especially after having read about
jekyll processing support at github, to understand why it was making me
precompile and put the compiled code in its own branch.

Furthermore I had to modify the jekyll source to make it work the way I wanted
in the end: <https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/pull/337>

I'm curious to see this go full-circle... Hosted Jekyll with point-and-click
plugins, themes... which gives you a gui to edit your posts, and then you
click to commit to github where it's generated and hosted!

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rcthompson
It would be nice to see directions on how to host your blog on your own server
instead of using Github. I assume these directions are lying around somewhere,
so most likely it is sufficient to just link to them.

~~~
apsurd
There's a deployment page that, I agree, can definitely use some work :
<http://jekyllbootstrap.com/usage/deployment-and-hosting.html>

The link to the docs are at the bottom: (custom jekyll deployment strategies)

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upthedale
Looks good. Minor nuisance - The "fork on github" banner covered up the
sidebar for me. Well, not so much the banner but its transparent bounding box,
preventing me from clicking the underlying links.

My screen width is 1280, but I had a side panel open in my browser, reducing
the available space. Of course maximising things got rid of the problem, but
why should I do that? :)

Maybe move it to the left? (either the banner or sidebar)

------
meeeu
it works <http://meeeu.github.com/>

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drivebyacct2
Nitpick, why do people insist on typing "$" for the shell prompt? It makes it
impossible to copy/paste.

~~~
apsurd
a good idea would to have it be part of the layout so highlighting it would
only highlight the actual text you want to highlight ... hmmm! good idea ..

~~~
threepointone
.line:before{ content:'$'; /* etc */ }

that should do it. you'd have to wrap each line in a tag though.

