Octopress Falls... No More
Thursday 29th May, 2014
Err, actually, it does.
For sometime, we’ve been using Octopress to generate this static website. Well, no longer. The dyce.com is still generated statically, but instead of Octopress we now use docpad. Why? That’s a very good questions
The main reason is not because we fancied a change. No, it comes down to support.
Octopress seems (a) to have a very small community, and (b) v2.0 seems to be the last release (as of July 23rd, 2011).
After the reset debacle following the move to a triple boot system, the prospect of re-installing brew and octopress was unpleasant. So, casting about for another markdown-based, static site generator, I came across docpad, and well, here we are.
Points in favour:
- it’s built using node.js, so installation is trivial
- it keeps itself to itself, so there’s just one folder to backup
- it’s tightly integrated with git and GitHub
- it supports markdown out of the box
- templates are language agnostic (but CoffeeScript is preferred)
- it has a simple plugin architecture
- it has automated deployment
Points against:
- automated deployment, yes, but not via RSync
- I don’t know CoffeeScript
However, that last point also counts as a point in favour - I love learning new languages.
Getting started with docpad is a snap, mostly because just running it for the first time gives you the chance to try out 20 or so pre-built sites, ready for you to steal research elements from. All told it’s not that steep a learning curve, and docpad appears to have a much large, more loquacious community.
Much fun, many gists.
I’ll put a few posts together covering the plugins I’ve used, the various gotchas, and helpers I’ve kludged together, and post them as soon as.