Blogging the Way Hackers Do, with Octopress

There are a plethora of popular blogging platforms available to choose from—Blogger, Wordpress and Posterous, to name a few. These have achieved considerable mainstream success, and host millions of blogs online. Lots of people adore these options, but fo

With the innumerable existing platforms, you might be tempted to consider Octopress as ‘yet another’ other’ bORJJLQJ IUDPHwRUN. ThLV LV GHfiQLWHOy QRW WhH case, since Octopress is fundamentally different from other frameworks in its philosophy and approach towards blogging. ogging.

Octopress is built with Jekyll, a static site generator. r. The idea behind Jekyll is very simple and elegant. It takes kes a template directory as an input, runs a parser on it, and d generates a simple static HTML website. This provides s Octopress with several advantages, but restricts it to a website with static content. However, this is not much of a restriction for blogging, as there is hardly any dynamic content associated with the task. With Octopress, there is no code and database involved, no caching and scaling issues to deal with—and, as you will discover as you explore further, with diteub Pages, no hosting fee to pay as well! You get a powerful, easy to customise, easy to migrate, mobileresponsive blog. Last, but not the least, it gives you the VDWLVIDFWLRQ RI ORRNLQJ DW yRXU bORJ SRVWV DV WHxW fiOHV, DQG QRW as table attributes in a database.

Octopress allows you to blog from the comfort of your favourite text editor and shell. If the CLI is your bread and butter, the experience will be amazing. However, if you are QRW FRPIRUWDbOH wLWh WhH GLW wRUNflRw RU wLWh wRUNLQJ RQ WhH command line, Octopress might not be the best choice for you.

Now you need to install the dependencies. Grab bundler, which helps in managing package (known as gems in Ruby) dependencies for a Ruby application.