Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

The default theme is almost identical to the Octopress home page. The only differences are the color scheme and header logo.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com