

Octopress 3.0 is coming - imathis
http://octopress.org/2015/01/15/octopress-3.0-is-coming/

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danso
First of all, kudos to the OP for his work on Octopress...without it, I
would've never gotten into Jekyll, and I would've never understood the joy and
simplicity of static site development...trying out Octopress was one of the
best things to happen to me as a (Rails) web developer.

The most surprising thing to me in the OP was seeing that Octopress users had
been updating their sites all this time...I frequently checked back on the
Octopress blog, and then the Git repo, to see how to go about doing that. I
tinkered around playing with the dev branches but didn't know enough to get
around their hiccups. Finally I gave up on it and just went to Jekyll, which
was definitely a blessing in disguise, as it let me figure out more of the
process of static site building, with fewer abstractions and conveniences in
the way.

I don't know if I'll ever go back to Octopress -- I'm a devout Middleman user
now -- but the direction it's taking seems to be the right one, and I'm amazed
that the author, these past few years, is still cranking away at what could
easily just be a legacy, soul-sucking project -- given the size of the
userbase and the number of dependencies/upgrades involved in changing the code
base.

~~~
imathis
Thanks for your story. I've heard that from so many people. That Octopress
opened doors for them and exposed them to new interests. It's pretty much the
best thing I could ask to hear. I love that I was able to be a part of that
spark for people. So, thanks for sharing!

For what it's worth, I'm also a huge fan of Middleman. It's a great project
and I use it for some things too. For a while, when Jekyll was in a dry spell,
I considered building Octopress tools for Middleman as well, but in the end I
prefer the simplicity of Jekyll.

Middleman is great, but it's too much like the view layer of Rails. To me,
Jekyll feels more like the native web.

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imathis
This is a post about what's badly wrong with Octopress 2.0 and how 3.0 is
shaping up to be awesome.

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jeffbarr
Looks awesome. Now if there was a clean way to do incremental rebuilds and
pushes, I would be very happy. Octopress is awesome until you start to
accumulate hundreds or thousands of posts that must be regenerated and pushed
to the target. The regeneration process is intrinsically serial at this point
and does not take advantage of multiple threads or processes.

~~~
stdbrouw
I have my own little blogging engine based on
[https://github.com/debrouwere/render](https://github.com/debrouwere/render)
and what I've found is that the bottleneck is almost always IO. Rendering
templates is so fast it simply does not matter whether you run it on a
gazillion cores or not. Getting data from disk and then writing it to disk
means you're dealing with contention, where parallelizing stuff can actually
make it slower. So it can actually make sense to do all of this serially.

But of course, that doesn't mean you can't do incremental rebuilds. If the
data is older than both the HTML and the template, then there's no need to
rerender. More generators should support this, either internally or by making
it easier to run them as part of a Make build.

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EthicsGradient
I love the whole idea of static site generators. Jekyll, Middleman, etc.
They're hard things to "hand-off" to a client. I'd love to see more work going
into an interface for content managers (make it easy for them to update basic
settings, add content, etc.). Prose, and Siteleaf get at this a bit.

~~~
walterbell
There may be some ideas in Netobjects Fusion,
[http://netobjects.com](http://netobjects.com)

~~~
peckrob
Wow. That's a blast from the past.

NetObjects Fusion had some interesting features and ideas. My first non-intern
job was with a company that did e-Learning materials. Our products were
basically self-contained websites, with video content and scripted subtitled
text, distributed on CDs. This was 2002 or so, so it was super bleeding edge
then.

Our entire infrastructure relied on the extensive scriptability and
plugability of NetObjects Fusion. We had an entire authoring system and video
production pipeline that would allow NetObjects to generate pages for the
videos with templates, all things needed included. All you had to do was drag
the video player into the page and set the right property, and our build
system would handle everything else.

The process was so automated on the technical side that it allowed the task of
actually assembling the sites themselves to be farmed out to University
students with little technical training. Although, speaking as someone who was
initially hired as one of those "production workers," we were paid very well
relative to other traditional college jobs and the work, while sometimes
tedious, was often interesting and fun. I got to learn so many random things -
how tires are made, how the propellant for the Space Shuttle's SRBs was mixed,
etc.

Even now, I can still, a bit fondly, remember the hierarchical layout of
NetObjects, with it's little yellow and black shields representing pages.

It was also a great company to work for. The owner was a business professor
full time and this was his side project. We were always small, and him and his
wife always took an interest in all the students that worked for them. Getting
a home-cooked meal and a night of poker once a week was a nice perk for a poor
college student.

The cool thing, though, was there was no pressure to stay. They knew we were
students, they knew we were going to graduate eventually and take jobs
elsewhere. It was a mutually beneficial scenario where they got relatively
cheap labor (at the time), and we got good experience before heading out into
the world.

I ended up staying on there for another 3 months or so after I graduated
before taking my first full-time programming job. A big part of me landing
that first post-college job was due to experienced I gained working in that
environment. First as a lowly production worker, then advancing to graphic
design, administering the network and programming plugins and scripting for
NetObjects.

So I suppose my career would probably look very different without NetObjects
Fusion.

~~~
walterbell
Cool story, didn't know about the automation and scriptability. I wonder how
many customers are still using NetObjects Fusion today, e.g. how well it has
kept up with changes in the browser landscape.

Edit: was a browser included on the CDs? Today, one could bundle a portable-
apps version of Firefox, increasing the likelihood of the content remaining
readable, without needing external plugins for video.

~~~
peckrob
It's been awhile so I don't remember the full specifics, but it was bundled
with a specially configured version of Internet Explorer in a mode much like
kiosk mode, but even more locked down. No right click menu, navigation, etc.
Just basically a full-screen browser with no chrome. Administrators had to hit
a special key sequence to exit.

------
ericdykstra
Looks amazing! Huge fan of Octopress, but I'm looking to turn my blog multi-
language and the way Octopress is currently set-up makes it a bit of a pain,
but it looks like it will be quite a bit easier for anyone to make an
Internationalization plugin for Octopress 3.0. Is anyone working on one
currently?

~~~
imathis
There are people who use Jekyll for multilingual blogging without any special
plugin. Since I don't, I'm not sure I can give you advice on the best
technique. A bit of Googling and you'll be set.

If you find a workflow that works for you, post an issue on GitHub and maybe I
can help automate parts of it. If it's just about adding YAML data, the new
post templates feature of Octopress should take care of you there.

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listic
Is there a popular static site generator for node.js?

EDIT: Whoops, there's now even a directory listing static site generators in
different languages! [https://www.staticgen.com/](https://www.staticgen.com/)

~~~
azurelogic
I looked at Hexo, Assemble, Wintersmith, Docpad, Metalsmith, and many others.
I wanted flexibility to restructure as I saw fit and easily add structures
other than just blogs. I tried docpad but it struck me as too "tell you how
it's gonna be", even setting your front end template. Metalsmith
([http://www.metalsmith.io/](http://www.metalsmith.io/)) was a great solution
to that. It's a lot like using Gulp and Express' middleware plugins. I liked
that I could completely customize the build pipeline to get exactly what I
wanted. There's also a way to do your build pipeline with config files, if
that's your cup of tea.

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tbaschak
Been using octopress for a little over a year now, and this post sums up
everything thats been a pain in the ass for me when it comes to
upgrades/customization/etc.

HERE HERE! Can't wait for this to be out!

~~~
dmayle
I hope, however, that the author gives some thought to being able to freeze
content, perhaps at the plugin level. I would hate to use a plugin, generate
output, and find that at some point in the future, when the gem hasn't been
maintained, the rest of my site suffers because I'm no longer able to mix
current code with a plugin used at some point in the past. It would be great
if I could have some sort of 'freeze' functionality that would take all the
plugin level output as it exists today, lock it down, and update the rest of
the site without having that plugin installed any more.

~~~
imathis
You can specify a specific version of a plugin in the Gemfile and it will
never change, but you'll be able to update everything else.

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olalonde
Talk about bad timing, I just moved from Octopress to vanilla Jekyll
yesterday. The only thing I really miss from Octopress is the CLI for
generating new posts and it seems I'll be able to use it again, yay.
[http://prose.io/](http://prose.io/) is also an interesting project for
editing posts.

~~~
imathis
Not sure why you'd say "bad timing". Moving to Vanilla Jekyll is the right
decision. You'll be able to use any and all of the new plugins. There's no
distinction anymore.

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jtwebman
Hmm thank you for the story and the awesome work. Though I use DocPad right
now Octopress / Jekyll is a great as well. And maybe we have room for another
static site generator....The one I am working on :)

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thirdtruck
Glad to see this! I experimented with Octopress a while ago, and I've been
meaning to try it out again.

