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.

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.

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.

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.

Agreed. This is a problem that I hope Jekyll manages to solve and it looks like they may be getting closer: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/pull/3116

I look at GitHub issues and I'm just afraid to mess with things. Even if I fix stuff, there's a high likelihood that it will break something else or be hard to update to. I too cannot wait to release this.

There have been people over the years who've been eager to build a GUI for Octopress. Without a good CLI it would be a huge pain. Many of the things I've been working on, should make it easier for that to happen.

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

Octopress has slowed down due to my need for help with a few things. I've tried working with a few folks, but it hasn't worked out. Now I'm getting the help I need and things are cranking up again. Believing that Jekyll has a future is a great motivator too.

Check out the plugins for sharing code http://octopress.org/docs/blogging/code This was obsessively designed with hackers in mind.

There's no official affiliation with Github. I started thinking through the branding for Octopress in 2009 when it first came out. I was looking for a good mascot and around the same time David Lanham did his 'Bubble Bay' design for a firefox campaign http://davidlanham.com/art/bubblebay/

I started thinking that an Octopus would be a great mascot. They're intelligent, flexible, and have loads of personality. And I asked David to do the artwork for the logo.

The 'press' part was taken from Wordpress, but mainly because I really like how subtly different it is from Octopus.

If you're already using Jekyll, you might consider moving to Octopress if you like the design, plugins, or rake tasks. It's MIT licensed, so if you would rather just snag those and integrate them into your existing blog that's fine too.

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

Everything is explained thoroughly but there are really only 3 steps, all on the first page http://octopress.org/docs/setup

1. Clone Octopress 2. Bundle install 3. Rake install

The reset of the documentation is about deploying, customizing, and updating.

The tagline has nothing to do with Hacker News, the fact that you would even say that is amusing.

Octopress is a framework for Jekyll, which — like most static site generators — was built for hackers. Octopress is a well designed starting point for Jekyll blogging.

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.

Finally caught it. Thanks.

SASS compiles to CSS.

Certainly. As far as IE6 support can go without compromising on simplicity.

As far as amount of css goes, here's what you're dealing with to achieve something similar in only CSS.

  1. Button reset - to get browsers to the same starting point
  2. Rounded corners, Text shadows, and Gradients + vendoring
  3. Background image fallback
  4. Padding, Text size, line-height, etc
  5. Default, Hover, and Active states for all styles

That's a lot of css to write, effectively reduced to a single mixin. Of course, it's also great that you can use the bare minimum html.

IE6 doesn't easily support png transparency. It basically just looks like a flat colored boxy button with a border.

Fascinating, thanks for sharing your experience. Pixel perfection certainly is a tempting goal, but I've spent too much time and other people's money trying to preserve the illusion that IE is anything less than garbage. I've had enough. Now I'm more focused on usability and I find it far more rewarding.

Exactly. Whom among us hasn't written down every useful thought we've ever had and blogged it? If all of our friends blogged, would we even want hang out?