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Comment by peddamat | Hacker News Reader

As someone currently, as in, right at this moment, converting their blog to Jekyll/Octopress. Is there any reason not to simply use Octopress?

From my research over the past couple of weeks, it seems like Octopress is basically Jekyll with a bunch of plugins and niceties.

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I started out using Octopress but in the end chose to go just plain Jekyll and borrow from Octopress only the things I needed. I'm pretty happy with my decision.

Ultimately, you just need to look at the feature-set of Octopress and decide if you actually want those things (custom theme, Disqus and GA integration, etc). If you do, great, if not, it's probably going to get in the way more than help.

Do you mind if I ask which parts of Octopress you found most useful?

Mainly parts from two of the rake tasks: 1) to create new posts 2) to deploy to Github pages

I ended up creating my own distribution of Jekyll which diverges significantly from Octopress. While it doesn't have anywhere near the following that Octopress does, it suits my uses more than fine.

https://github.com/josegonzalez/cimino

As long as you spend a bunch of time customizing the theme, no.

Default-theme Octopress users all automatically get lumped under 'some dude using default Octopress' category in my brain - it's as close as you can get to publishing completely anonymously.

To be fair, the number of people who are over exposed to the point of a visceral feeling toward default Octopress has to be pretty small. But not putting you down or anything. Indeed, i can understand you feeling that way.

I don't dislike or otherwise feel viscerally towards the default Octopress theme - I can just remember the way a website looks far more easily than I can someone's name.

When I see a visually distinctive site for the second time, I think 'ah ha, I've been here before'. When I see someone's Octopress blog, I never know if it's the first or second or tenth time I've visited that particular blog.

I have the same trouble with Svbtle blogs, if they use a similar accent color - there's 'red Svbtle guy' and 'blue Svbtle guy' but with very few exceptions there aren't any discrete individuals.

I see. I jumped the gun and did not see your point was more nuanced than I thought. Yeah, o agree with what you say. I dont really come across default Octopress much anymore, but yeah I get the whole Svbtle look being around too much now and not showing individualism.

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