Octopress
Octopress is a dynamic blogging platform designed for producers of web content who like more control over their platform
- Integrated markdown syntax improves functionality
- Support for most Jekyll plugins
- Supports the latest CSS3 and HTML5 standards
- Built on Jekyll, one of the most reliable blogging server frameworks around
- Persistent updates and open support from Octopress' developer means the software is constantly improving
- Runs and renders content at a reliably steady pace
- Offers less flexibility than a standard Jekyll framework
- Requires a functional understanding of coding languages
Plenty of providers offer clean and pretty interfaces that streamline the process of creating, updating, and maintaining blogs, but many of these sacrifice deeper level customization for the sake of pretty templates and an easy user interface. On the other end of the spectrum is something like Jekyll, a framework that converts your plain text into websites. Somewhere in the middle of Octopress, a framework that sits atop Jekyll and offers a range of convenient bells and whistles that give users more functionality without having to dig deep into code or be restricted by the limited gating of more standardized blogging platforms. Octopress also tends to be more efficient than providers like Wordpress, rendering far more quickly and offering less bugs to deal with in the blog design process. One of the great strengths of Octopress is how well it stands on its own (taking into account, of course, that it still needs Jekyll to run). Most of the functionality you need for your blog is available through the Octopress framework, so there's no need to depend on third party services or products to keep your web server up and running the way it should. That also decreases the risk of frustrating bugs and compatibility issues. The results are a website that runs fast despite relying on the latest versions of HTML5 and CSS3. All the cool new functions you'll find in the latest versions of these programming languages will be available to you without any complications along the way. If you're going to spend hours digging into coding and blog setup, you want a nice interface to look at, and Octopress is remarkably beautiful. While the option to customize your UI is there, most users will probably never feel the need to change things up from the default design. The developers clearly put a lot of work into creating an interface that's both functional and aesthetically pleasing, and small commitments like that can go a long way to endearing yourself to a product like this. Installation is a simple process. While it requires some command line programming in Jekyll, that's to be expected from anyone who intends to use or has experience using that interface anyway. Once you get it booted up, everything is ready to go straight out of the box. There's no need to configure the software or create your own HTML interfaces, and the Octopress platform comes preloaded with most of the libraries and functions you'll need for CSS and JavaScript integration on your blog server. Being built off the Jekyll framework comes with some advantages as well. Jekyll's prolific use in the community means that there are a wide selection of plugins available for the aspiring creative, and many enterprising members of the community have even created plugins designed specifically for use with Octopress.