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!
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.
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.
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
The real reason it's "for hackers" is for marketing. That and improving its chances for a front-page mention here.
What's so hard about using your own editor and when you're done, pasting your text in the web form?
1. Clone Octopress 2. Bundle install 3. Rake install
The reset of the documentation is about deploying, customizing, and updating.
[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...
From the page:
Tekuti means "I'm telling you" in Oshiwambo.
It is weblog software written in Scheme, using Git as its persistent store.
Good show.
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.
If I were going to make a new site based on Jekyll, I'd seriously consider Hyde instead.
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.
http://thechangelog.com/post/1156862826/octobot-java-scala-r...
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.
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.
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