Octopress: A Blogging Framework for Hackers

I’m sure that you’ve heard about Jekyll, but have you heard of Octopress? Well, Octopress 2.0 just surfaced and it’s definitely something that will get the hacking blogger happy.

Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll, the blog aware static site generator powering Github Pages. If you’ve ever picked up Jekyll to start a hacker blog, you were probably saddened when you realized that you’d have to write your own HTML templates, CSS, JavaScript and set up all your configuration. We’re the type of people who like frameworks and having the mundane taken care of for us.

That’s exactly the problem that Octopress solves, and then some.

Octopress comes with

• Semantic HTML5 template
• Mobile friendly, responsive, layout
• Built in 3rd party support for Twitter, Google +1, Disqus Comments, Pinboard, Delicious, and Google Analytics
• Easy deployment using GitHub pages or Rsync
• Built in support for POW and Rack servers
• Easy theming with Sass and Compass
• Beautiful Solarized syntax highlighting
• Plugins specific for Octopress and Jekyll

Ready to Get Started?

Octopress is really easy to set up and deploy and Brandon has done a great job documenting how to get started.

For help, head to convore.com/octopress or #octopress on irc.freenode.net. Also be sure to follow @octopress and @imathis on Twitter.

Brandon also made an appearance on Episode 0.1.7 where we talked about Open Source publishing with Geoffrey Grosenbach, Brandon Mathis, and Tim Caswell.

Check out the source on GitHub and the Octopress homepage for more details.