My Octopress Blog
UPDATE: My blog apparently now runs on astro!? Ignore this post and also the other update.
UPDATE: My blog now runs on pelican. Ignore this post. Really.
So I have a new website/blog. It is made with the octopress blogging framework. Octopress is rather different from all the content management systems and blogs I’ve seen before. Since version 2.0 it is based on jekyll and thus has a completetly different approach on content management and creation. It uses rake tasks to accomplish most of the work. Because octopress is a framework, the comfort for creating and managing content are rather sparse, but then again it is really powerfull if you know what you’re doing.
CMF instead of CMS
Octopress is a content management framework, not a content management system. What that means in practice is that you would create a new blog entry with a rake task on your commandline like this:
$ rake new_post["My octopress blog"]This command simply creates a markdown-file with some attributes predefined:
---
layout: post
title: "My octopress blog"
date: 2014-07-30 17:36:44 +0200
comments: true
categories:
---Below these attributes you can write your blog entry in markdown (with some cool octopress features included). If you want to manage your posts you can add an author or a published field. Because it’s markdown you can easily inject some HTML into your post.
That’s it. No user management, no unnecessary back-end menus. I really like it :)
The power of simplicity
Because octopress consists of a few HTML files (with templating) here and a few sass files there you can easily change the layout and the pages to match how you want them to be.
I really like the idea to use a real files to store the blog posts. I don’t really need a fancy SQL database to store information about the user, about plugins and about my posts. Things like comments can be injected with disqus. You can even write your post offline and then upload them as soon as you are back online. It just makes everything so much simpler.
The only downside to this is that you need to deploy your blog every time you post a new entry. But if you host your little blog on Heroku that is less of a problem. Update: This blog is no longer running on Heroku
Not for everyone
Octopress however is not suited for everyone. Multi-author blogs are supported, but writing my name into every post does not do it for most people. Implementing your own comment system is nearly impossible without setting up a database.
But octopress does not want to be for everyone. It describes itself as “a blogging framework for hackers”. And that is exactly what it is. For people who just want to run their little blog, share their thoughts and ideas and also want to some really cool syntax highlight ;) its a really impressive alternative.