Octopress 3.0

We'll go back everyone. This is the change vlog and I'm your host, Adam Stikoviak. This is episode 162, and on today's show, we're joined by Brandon Mathis. Brandon is the creator of Optopress.

If you haven't seen Optopress, I don't know where you've been at, because so many blogs out there right now, leverage Optopress, well, 2.0, Optopress, not 3.0. 3.0 is a complete rewrite. We dive deep into that with this show here. 2.0 is gone, 3.0 is basically out there.

The announcement hasn't been official. There's some things Brandon's working on, which you'll hear in the show, but 3.0 is basically Jekyll's Ferrari, you know? So get excited about this show and what Brandon's working on. We have three awesome sponsors, Co-Shift, Dreamhost, and Top Town.

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Long time in the making for the show, Brandon, I've wanted to have you back to talk about Octopress 3.0. I think, Jared, we've covered Octopress how many times on Chief All-Weekly? Lots of times. At least a couple.

And every time we do, we get tweets and emails and fan mail, I get mail to my house, my home address, saying more Octopress. So Brandon, welcome back. Thanks for letting me back. Octopress 3.0, how excited are you?

Oh, really excited. I am. It's been a lot of hard work. Gosh, for real.

I mean, it's not just a lot of hard work. It's also been a lot of learning, which is the fun part, but it's kind of like when I first started working on Octopress, it was just some cool thing that I'd barely figured out to do. But then once people started using it, I started to find out there's a lot of different needs for it. And then finally, I was able to take time to sit back and say, if I had any skills, what would this look like?

And so then I spent two years trying to build those skills and then build what I wanted to make the first time if I knew how to do it. I can see that Brandonmathis.com is still using the original design you had done. And this was in Jekyll, right? This site here?

Oh, yeah, it is Jekyll. That's what got me starting with Octopress. That is probably using Octopress 1. There's not even a post on there announcing Octopress.

It's just some other project that I released right before it. And that's always kind of something I am able to appreciate and laugh at myself about. I decided at some point that at this point in my life, my code is more valuable than the other things I write about. And so I've poured a lot of energy into building it.

Yeah, making it so that other people can write their sites and building nice tools and developing that. I really hope to kind of turn back and write a lot about what I've learned and have a nice blog again. But I didn't want to distract myself. You've got a full-time job.

You can have your full-time job. You work in Compose, formerly Mongo HQ. So I know we use Mongo HQ at PureTrader when I work there for our Mongo hosting, which is great. And you created Octopress six years ago.

So for everybody listening now, catching up, saying, what the heck, Octopress 3.0, what happened to 1.92.0? Well, 2.0 is out there. And I guess 3.0 is sort of out there. We'll hear more from you today.

Hasn't talked about it quite as much like you just said there because you're not really doing much of your blog. And even the latest post on Octopress.org isn't quite saying like, hey, here it is. Right, yeah, I have a version of that post in a draft that I'm kind of working on, figuring out how I want to do some things. The post to other right now is talking about, this is Octopress 3 is coming in.

Basically, I just throw my dirty laundry on there and dissected it and said, this is what I did wrong with Octopress 2. A lot of people are using it and enjoying it. And I'm sorry for these mistakes I've made. These are things I've learned.

That's what I'm bringing. That's what I'm talking about. You know, somebody doesn't think good. They don't have their full time to give to it.

And so you either get more people involved in your project or you're a one-man show. Like you've been, I think you've had some help too from Parker Moore back and forth with Jackman. I think you're part of the core team with Jekyll now. Are you just sort of playing some sort of role in that?

Well, no, I'm not a core team member. I am a friend of Jekyll. I don't know, like you say, got a friend of the show or whatever, I get some friend of Jekyll in that way. Because for example, I recently participated in Jekyll Conf, which is an online conference.

That's awesome. And lots of people were there, including Tom Preston Moore, who created Jekyll, and Parker, who's the lead maintainer right now. And I showed off some of the new stuff I've been building. And they were taking questions on Twitter and pretty much immediately after I started showing a couple things Tom wrote in saying, why isn't this that part of core?

And would you be okay with adding it? I'm like, sure, you'd steal what you want. It's MIT, I'll help however. But you know, on the tagline for Octopus used to be, what was it, a blogging framework for hackers or something like that?

Something like that. Yeah, which is funny because somebody posted on Hacker News when 2.0 came out. And of course, I didn't know what Hacker News was at the time. I still barely do.

I don't pay attention to that stuff, believe it or not. And some guy accused me of picking up as a tagline just on Hacker News. I'm like, dude, I don't even know what this is, what's going on. But now the tagline I'm playing right now, which is just, it's like a, you know, who cares what you say about something.

But the way I look at Octopus is that it's like Jekyll's Ferrari. So if Jekyll had, you know, or. Good job, maybe. Yeah.

Well, it's like an engine. It's like Jekyll is a lightweight sprint runner. He's got some skills and stuff, but everyone wants to jump to a Ferrari and just blast it. And so that's kind of what Octopus is about.

It's like, this is the place where Jekyll feels good. I don't know if it's sensible or not, but basically, there are a whole bunch of tools built around Jekyll and Octopus is just my name for tools that I build to make that ecosystem have the things that I want in it. And we can talk about some more of those in a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about the history to a degree, especially which is just mentioned the name WordPress, right?

So is Octopus a play on that? Or is that why press is after Octo? Was it a GitHub thing? You know, everybody assimilates Octo for something GitHub, right?

So you got, I don't know. But they have Octo conference, just code conference. I'm like that. But they do Octo something all the time there.

Yeah, Octo cat. And then you have Octo kit too, which is the API kit. The API framework. Right.

Octicons are their icons. Yeah. I actually say, for people who are building stuff that goes with the GitHub API, don't use the name GitHub, use the name Octo. And so actually, Octopus doesn't have anything to do with that.

I just haven't really liked Octopuses. And you can actually say either. But then you just said you can say either now. I was going to correct it too.

But I just thought it was going to correct you. Well, I'm just actually making this up. So anyway, though, I thought, yeah, this was a rage quitting of WordPress. And I thought, what would be a cool thing is, I just pictured what is now the icon, which was, or the, it's not really an icon.

The graphic that I use is an Octopus typing on a typewriter. And I got David Lanham to do that art. And actually, thinking of David Lanham designing that art and having the, you know, what it was going to look like was a part of me taking the name. I just really thought it would be cool to have an Octopus in this whole typewriter.

So did I say an Octopus or an Octopus? That's what I meant. Anyway, my autocorrect is like, doesn't ever know what I'm trying to talk about. Well, yeah, it's not in your voice.

It's on your phone. Oh, correct. Yes. Well, I guess, yeah.

You can teach your computer. You can't teach your phone. That's right on my computer. It knows what it's expecting.

So anyway, yeah, I was rage quitting WordPress. And I just thought that would be a neat. You know, it's such a close word to Octopus. And so yeah, it was just as simple as that.

So it's more of an affinity towards, I guess, anti-affinity to WordPress than it would be an affinity to GitHub. Right. Yeah. You know, I guess, I don't know, maybe some of GitHub at the time could have influenced that.

This was in early 2000s. Yeah, this is all the time. So really, I think I started using GitHub in 2008, maybe. It wasn't, I mean, it wasn't as eating the world as it is today.

And so I, you know, looking back, I, that's how I remember it. It may have also been that GitHub had an Octocap. I don't really remember if they think it was pretty new. Such a mention.

Hey, it's June 5th, 2008. What were you doing that day? I was doing GitHub. I was like, I am so done with subversion.

I was celebrating. I was like, what is a branch? What is a branch? I'm doing it.

GitHub? Yeah. I don't know. How do I find out?

You got your, your profile page. All right. Cool. So this is what we're going to do here.

I'll tell you here in a second. April 22nd. So you beat Brandon. I beat you.

Yeah. Let's see if I beat me. Yes. March 12th.

Same year. So you beat me. They didn't open up until I think January that year. It was such a neat times too.

Brings back memories. I remember having a conversation with Josh Owens, a co-host of a podcast that ran a while you called the Web 2.0 show. If anybody listened to that show, shout out. We were actually in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo, which was super cool back in the day.

And we went over to Pivotal Labs and met up with Tom Presto Warner and Chris Wancharoth and sat down and had a face-to-face conversation about GitHub like a month before this. So like February time frame. Crazy. That's what I'm going to show or just for fun.

No. We released the podcast. I'll leave it up in the show tonight. It's out there on the Web Studio.

But yeah. It's just crazy how time flies and six years ago. I mean, that's, I mean, that's Optipress six years ago, but like GitHub is, you know, going like six, eight, seven, eight. It was around before I started Optipress because I learned some of the initial things that I put into my first version from there.

John Long had some write tasks for deploying stuff through our sync and I was like, no, wait, you can just point our sync at a directory and SSH it somewhere. This is amazing. And this is before GitHub pages and stuff. And so that was the initial version was just basically my blog fork it and then run some write tasks.

Yeah. For those who want to know the, I guess the link, I'm trying to fly it real quick. Let's see. Where is that?

Okay. I can't find it. Check the show notes. It's in this list.

That's crazy. But yeah, we had some fun going out there and talking to those guys and it's just been such a ride to for GitHub. It's been so long. And I guess we're talking about the past a little bit.

This isn't your first time on this podcast either, and you've been on the show in its infancy episode 17 where this is episode one, six, two. It might be one, six, three. So if you're listening to this and it's actually one, six, three, sorry, but it's right in Adam wants to be corrected. Yeah.

Change that. Yeah. Yeah. But episode 17 was March 11th, 2010, which, you know, it's a long time ago, man.

It feels like we're getting old. All the young people listening to the show. Jeez. That's especially again.

Anyways. So octopress 3.0, that's where we're at now, but it began somewhere, one point, obviously, or somewhere around there. 2.0 is what I think the website best represents, you know, or at least talking about. So you got a full time job.

This has been like, I told Jared in the pre-call, like, this is your curl. We had, um, Jesus, Daniel Stenberg, Daniel Stenberg, yeah, and Daniel Stenberg wrote curl and lib curl. And he's been doing that for how many years? 17 years.

17 years. And he's been doing that for 17 years, right? Like imagine that. That's wild.

Is that what octopress is for you? Is that right now? I mean, I actually do a lot of other stuff too. Right now.

Another side project is a personality profile test that, um, it is a, yeah, I thought it'd be fun to have, because, you know, all these pro, I love, I study personalities and they're fascinating in the way they work and, and all the tests out there, though, are either crappy or you pay to take them. And I thought, well, you know, with all, I haven't studied this stuff for like 14, 15 years. And, um, given the kind of questions, these things ask me very easy to write my own and then put it on GitHub and have people submit pull requests to improve the questions and stuff. And then also for people who are curious about that kind of stuff, how that stuff works, they can see a really simple test.

And so there's, you know, I'm still working on launching it, but stuff like that, you know, I've got to also HSL color picker.com. Yeah. I'm just a friend and tool. So there's, you know, there's all kinds of things that I, uh, I like to build.

I guess that you mentioned that we should also mention, are you still on the core team of, uh, of, uh, Compass? So Compass has been, um, end of life and, uh, Chris, I know you don't hear about that? Mm. So I think, I think what's actually happened is, uh, Chris is moving on to spectacles, which is something that is more, um, I think it's written in JavaScript.

It's around, um, the, uh, lives, ass stuff with, uh, notes ass and it's, it's meant to be something that's easier for people to use than Compass and it's kind of a start over. And so Compass is, wow, like marginally supported as that right now. We should pause your show and talk about this now because I hadn't heard any of this news. So you need to talk to Chris then, um, he's, he's a really, he's looking for help.

He's trying to make, you know, bring a lot of the stuff in that, uh, people like about Compass, separate in a way that isn't, uh, a whole pile of, uh, do I want this or not? And people, you know, because the real nice thing about was, about Compass was how it would integrate into your environment and make it easy for you to, you know, reference images without having to maintain all the URLs to see stuff yourself. Although just so many cool things that Compass does, it is, uh, you know, he's trying to bring that to the community who isn't interested in using a Ruby. And so it's both speckles, but he's working on spectacles.

I think spectacles. Yeah. All right. What do you touch, Chris?

And actually really bad, like saying this on, on, on recording because I don't know if I'm accurately for training things or not. This is my, you know, caveats. Okay. Something you heard that the great ones.

Yeah, somebody made this up guys. I don't even know. Anyway, so are you still part of the Compass team then? Even if it's where it's over, man.

I really haven't been helping out with that for quite a while now. Um, I helped with building the website and some other things and, you know, some of my really plugins, I think maybe got people excited about what it's like to do plugins. I also wrote a book with Winedeline and Nathan Weisenberg, actually Natalie now. Natalie says Nathan on the cover though.

Um, and then, uh, and then Chris as well. And so that was my final contribution, I think. What was that book called? It was called Compass in Action or Sassan?

Sassan Compass in Action, I don't remember. I've got a Japanese version of it though, which is. I own the book right here on my bookshelf. I mean, look back here and see if I can see it.

Where's that? Yeah, there it is. Got the book. Yeah, they, uh, they also printed it and translated it in Japan.

And so they sent me one of those when they did. And it is a way better cover. It's like all pink and blue and goofy looking. And you know, it's just like this thing looks awesome.

It fell out of an 80s anime. Wow. So all that to say is that not only do you have a full time at compose, have a family and have a life. You also do optopress, HSL picker, personality test.

I've been a part of the Compass team for a bit, wrote a book to your busy, right? So that this is some reasons why two out of three, oh, have been, what, about a year and a half ish two years ago, two years. I mean, since I've been working on it in earnest, I, uh, yeah. So to answer the question that that seems to suggest I am working on this thing like crazy, uh, it is kind of like, uh, some people enjoy sports.

Uh, this is what I enjoy. So I went, you know, when I have free time in the evening, when I have energy, um, I sit down, I work on this for several hours. And so just for the safety sake, then, for those who are still trying to catch up with what, what off the press is, what's the one liner? And what is the author press?

Octopus is a collection of tools to make working, uh, with Jekyll sites better, more fun. And, uh, it makes me feel good. I don't know, I don't have a one liner. Well, octopus 2.0 is basically some guy's deckle block you can fork and modify.

Right. That's like all that might. What is wrong with me? Why did I build this post?

Right, right, right. There you go. So, yeah, this is, this is a, this is, okay. So I mean, do you want to talk about, um, the, what happened here?

What was going on with the transition? Because there were some serious deficiencies, um, according to us, but according to yourself and what we can 2.0, it looks like your octopus 2.0 surfaces post was, you know, 2011, July 2011. And then octopus 3 is on its way. So there's also some time, but four years in there, what, you call octopus 3, a complete rewrite.

So what was so wrong, uh, that it needed a complete rewrite. And why is it just to be blunt? Why is it taken so long? Beside all this stuff that we just said about family and job and all that.

Well, so when 2 came out, uh, I spent a lot of time just working on 2, uh, I think even in, uh, let me think, uh, yeah, for like a, for about a year and a half, I just spent time trying to make it better and, um, I guess digging the whole deeper, uh, instead of moving on. Cause really what the problem was is it is a, it's, uh, I'm at this octopus. There's a repo that you fork or a clone and then run some commands and make it your own and push it to your own, uh, get repository. Hopefully never fun when people say, Oh, I deleted my blog.

What do I do? I'm like, dude, uh, time machine? I don't know. Um, but, uh, yeah, so it was kind of like all set up for you to use a certain way, but the, you know, Jekyll has a plugin system that is really simple to use.

If you want to modify your own site, there's just a directory called plugins in your site source and you can just drop a Ruby file in there to get required, uh, as long as you're, you know, building it locally. If you push it to GitHub pages, it won't. Mm. But if you, uh, if you're building it locally, um, yeah, you can add and so I had a whole bunch of, uh, Ruby files in the plugins directory that would do all these cool things, like, uh, make it nice for you to write code snippets and generate nice HTML around those.

And, um, there were some right tasks that did, uh, uploading and configuring and all these kind of cool things. And so, you know, if you wanted to change anything, though, the problem is you're tracking my repository. All right. And so if I make an update and then you want to pull that in, you have to deal with merge conflicts, that kind of thing was just stupid.

And this is because I didn't know how to build gems. And that's one of the reasons why I never used it. Yeah, that's the dumb thing about it. And I was a middleman person before I was a Jekyll person.

And that was one of the reasons why I remember even since you mentioned John Long earlier, he and I worked on the sasway.com together. And when we redid the sasway from, I think it was, I feel what was written in originally, but it's written in middleman now. So that's a middleman site. And he talked about using all the press because you were doing 3.0 and all these new things.

And I'm like, yeah, you know, I just, I don't, I didn't like how, you know, but how things were so fractured, you know, and how they were so fragile. It seemed, you know, with the request and, you know, just not work with like merge issues and stuff like that. I was like, I don't want to deal with that. Yeah, it's just stupid.

I mean, like the, the configuration for your site is underscore config yaml file. And so if you make changes to that, and I'm like, oh, I should add this new thing. Or, you know, I want to, I want to change the way this plugin works, because someone sent a pull request that fixes this other thing. And all of a sudden you have to deal with a merge conflict of changes like that, as opposed to just, you know, it being in a gem and then you have your own configuration and stuff like that.

And so I mean, this is before, gosh, it's gotten so much easier to deploy Ruby gems now. And, you know, bundler is a big part of that. You can say bundler gem and then give it a name and it'll generate a gem scaffold for you and with all kinds of nice and false and stuff. And so you just dump your Ruby code in there and then run a couple of great commands and it ships it up to Ruby gems.

And it's like that simple and it wasn't that simple at the time. And also I wanted to build a command line interface and I still need to learn a lot of Ruby. I mean, I knew enough to write some cool plugins and I, you know, I got some insane knowledge of regular expressions. But other than that, you know, I just didn't have the skills.

And so I had a really hard time maintaining that. And right now there's a whole bunch of open issues. And some of it is just because I think the, uh, clone this and then mess with it is really attracted to a lot of people because they can see how everything works. It's not hit away in some gems somewhere.

Right. And so a lot of people used it who were getting to know Ruby for the first time or getting to know, you know, development or all kinds of things. Like it was, it was crazy. The number of people that talked to me who this was like their intro into the development world and it was because you just, it's so simple.

You just pull down and there it is and it works and you can mess with things. And, and so that had, uh, that had the negative side of that, though, of attracting a lot of people who didn't really know how development works. And so they would submit issues saying, Oh, it'd be cool if you added this thing. It'd be cool if you added this thing.

And so I got all this code that I can't use or that if I bring it in, it breaks other people's sites and it just, it was horrible to maintain. And so there are a lot of good things about it. But there were some really bad things about it too. I, I think when we, when I think about octopress, think about developer blogs for one and I feel like it's the, you know, Kubrick theme as it is to WordPress, which isn't quite relevant now, but it was back in the day.

So people who have, you know, been using WordPress for a long time, Kubrick was a really popular theme. I think it was the first original theme that WordPress recognized as a third party that became an official. And so if you saw WordPress site, you could easily recognize what WordPress based upon its theme. The same thing with octopress is that, um, I don't know how many blogs go out there.

And it's like, it's, it's basically the octopress site. As you see it now with a slightly different header, you know, text header or whatever, like it's, it caught on. And there are so many sites we link to and change all weekly or just in general that it's, it's, it's, it's out there, but a bit. And so it's very popular.

It's, it's been nice. Cause you know, it's, it's anything happens to me. If I don't hit stack overflow, I frequently hit an octopress blog looking for something and I always try to, um, find out. Do you give a little bit of stuff that happens?

Oh, no, not only do I, not only do I get excited, but I also, um, I always try to thank the person, uh, if they have a Twitter handle available or something, or if they have email, but, um, so it's just like, Hey, man, you know, thanks for, uh, helping me solve this problem. I'm excited to see that smart people like you are using octopress. So that was, that's always fun. So, so to summarize some of the issues you're trying to solve with and Jerry's original question was, what's, what's wrong with 2.0?

You know, why, why the four be right to 3.0? So a lot of the issues are, the way it was originally published was, you know, so you had a fork, your original version, you had to do with merge conflicts. And it was just sort of messed up. Gems have gotten a lot easier to publish for Ruby.

Uh, what was one of the things you mentioned? But I will say as a correction, you don't actually have to fork it. A lot of people did because I don't think people knew how to use GitHub at the beginning. It's like, before this, and it's mine, they didn't understand it's for contributing.

Um, so yeah, it was, I mean, it's just a, it's just a very simple separation of concerns, problems that if you build a, uh, one tool that has tons of different code that solves different problems, then it's really hard to break those apart when you need to figure out what's, what's going wrong. And so it wasn't really testable. There were so many challenges in developing a system that was like, it all kind of works together. And if you pull something out, you know, it wasn't, you know, it, like if you were moving one plugin, it may break another plugin that was expecting that because they don't have a dependency chain, they're just Ruby files.

And so then if you want to unwind something, you're like, well, you know, you're, you're actually editing all this code to figure out how to remove something. And that's just terrible. So I could go on about the many things, but it's basically just, I want to summarize what the real problems were so that it was clear as we step into deeper discussions about 3.0 here in just a bit that we can reflect back on some of the problems you've already illustrated with, which is why 3.0 is a rewrite, not just a. Right.

Then it's the way it was deployed was through Git, which meant you were tracking all myself. That's bad. Git is for collaboration. It's not for shipping a product.

That doesn't make any sense. Um, the other problem was that it was, uh, uh, yeah, all, all, all the pieces kind of were came with the puzzle and you couldn't really take them apart or add to it easily. And I think there's the main, main problems with it, really. And cool.

Let's, uh, let's take a break then. We'll do a sponsor break and when we come back, we'll start diving deeper into octopress 3.0. So we're back. Dreamhost now has managed VPS hosting built for speed and scalability, including solid state drives.

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Jared, gosh, man, octopress is, uh, check those Ferrari. I see it right here in the byline now. I didn't notice it before, but octopress 3. 3.0 space, hyphen space, Jekyll's Ferrari.

Jekyll's Ferrari. Yeah, I mean, that's just, you know, the fun thing is you can click the edit button and type whatever you want to. So, uh, a couple nights ago, I was like, yeah, I'm just gonna call it Jekyll's Ferrari for a little while. Oh, you know, hey, that's, you know, that's fine.

I like that. That's cool. So now you have sort of, octopress did originate on your user on GitHub. Now it has done work.

So you have.com slash octopress, OCTO, OCTO, P-R-E-S-S in case you did not a spell octopress. Um, so, so let's talk about, uh, 3.0. What, give me the elevator pitch to what's new in 3.0. What is 3.0 as compared to 2.0 and all the things we talked about so far.

So 3.0 is basically everything is shipped as an independent gem that has its own tests that has a CLI that kind of ties different tools together. And you can, you know, use any part you want to without having to adopt a whole system and it works with any Jekyll blog. There's no, uh, you have to change how you do things in order to adopt octopress. It's, you know, any Jekyll site can add a plug in and immediately get the value from it.

So walk me through the, the getting started then with 3.0. Do you, do you create a new Jekyll site? Do you clone something? Do you install a gem?

What's the process? Yeah, just create a new Jekyll site. I'm still working on the migration for two. So I'm not really ready to talk too much about that.

I'll tell you how hard it is and a little bit if you want. But, um, if you, if you have a Jekyll site, you basically just need to install the octopress gem and that will come with, um, you know, broken things out a lot. There are a lot of separate little pieces and octopress, the main gem doesn't include most of the plugins. It is mainly a CLI and a few other goodies.

So, um, it has a, uh, it has really nice tools for working with posts, pages, drafts, um, and a plant. And so you can, uh, you know, one of the things it does is kind of like rails generators, where you can kind of create a bunch of files that, you know, set up, uh, pages for you, you can just, uh, with octopress, scan line, you can run a command to create a new poster and a page and octopus introduced this concept of posting page templates. And so you can actually, there's a little templates directory where you can add any kind of file you want to and put, you know, HTML, Markdown, whatever you want. And in front matter, and when you create a new post, you can tell it to use a certain template as default or you can have, like, let's say you're writing sponsor posts, you can tell it to use a sponsor template and it'll generate a new post with the name you have and the date and everything and use your template, which is just kind of a nice thing to have for Jekyll.

Um, it also has like a, yeah, it's pretty nice. Uh, it's making things faster because, you know, if you don't know about Jekyll, you, there's like a lot of it's file system based. And so there is, well, the whole thing is, but a lot of it is particularly, uh, file system based instead of metadata based. So you have a file that is in a specific place in a post directory with a date in the file name and all kinds of things in order for Jekyll to consider that post and the way it treats it.

So it kind of just takes care of all that work for you. Also, there's, go ahead, Jekyll added a new concept of drafts in, I think two dot, uh, you want, I can't remember. And drafts are cool because they live in a separate drafts directory and you can generate your site with drafts or, you know, normally generating it doesn't include the drafts, but if you want to publish a draft, you have to move it over the post directory and change a bunch of metadata and do different things. And let's say you write a draft three days ago and now you have to add a date for it.

And you know, it's using, um, ISO 861 dates. And so it's like, I really want to type this out and stuff like that. It's like a computer can do that for me. So I added a, uh, command for creating the scenes, the octopus new draft and give it a title and it will double in your drafts folder, you write it, whatever you want.

And then you can just octopus publish and you can type, uh, any, it's like a search string for the title of that draft and it will take that draft and it will convert into a post and publish into your post directory and you can also unpublish post. So it works the same way. And if you have like, let's say you are writing about out of cars, you can say octopus unpublish cars and it will show you all the posts that have the word cars in the title and that you pick the one and it moves into drafts. That's cool.

Yeah, I like, I remember I guess what has become the CLI before. It was a rake file, you know, I remember your deployments and stuff like that. And I think you and I had similar ways to deploy static file system based sites that we use in middleman. I think before I was using serve from yet again, John Long, um, which actually now that I remember it now, that's what the SAS without common originally was a serve site.

And then we move it to middleman. Um, but I recall like what was, you know, now the CLI, I think was just basically a rake file. Um, can you talk a bit about the, you know, I guess this process to the CLI, the, you mentioned that, uh, octopus new point, I was leveraging, you know, many gems that you may or may not have installed, you can install and do do, do gems sort of come in and add onto the CLI, like how expensive is the CLI system you have? Um, so yeah, any gem created for octopus can extend the CLI.

And so for example, the deployment gem is separate. So octopus deploy is at, uh, you know, GitHub.com slash octopus slash deploy. It has, uh, all the deployment stuff. And the reason I did that is I wanted to have those tests handled separately, to have, uh, pull request handled separately, all that kind of thing.

And so that extends the CLI. So you can say octopus deploy in it S3 and it will generate a deploy YAML file for deploying to an S3, uh, system so you can configure it for cloud front. You can add, you know, your AWS keys or have those be read from your envy bars. Um, you can say, I want to deploy the arsenic or get based deployment for Heroku or GitHub pages or whatever, and it'll generate a deployment YAML for you.

And then when you just run octopus deploy, it's, you know, it's requiring that gem. It's looking, it's extending the CLI. And so it recognizes that command and it finds the, your deploy YAML and figures out what your settings are and runs all this crazy stuff and deploys it. And it, uh, it's, it's also nice because you can tell it to use a specific configuration.

If you want to deploy to a staging site, then maybe you have some, on some server that's protected so you can easily show previews to people. Uh, you can do that kind of thing with just telling it to use different configurations and whatever the default is. So it seems to be like, it's always been the hacker's blog system, right? And this seems like octopress takes it like it does make it a Ferrari.

Now that I'm hearing more and more about this. Like it, it definitely, you know, for someone who loves the tinker, people that remind me of tinker is like, when, uh, Jared, you're a tinker, man, it seems like this is the kind of thing that I'm a tinker to, but I mean, I think that I imagine you and me and are like, for sure, takers, you love playing with things like that. And, you know, you would dig in and start using Jekyll and start using octopress and like, little by little, start pulling in different gems into your processes into your system and maybe even write your own and leverage the CLI. And like this is a hacker's paradise to me.

I think, let me just speak to that real quick here. Uh, I think when I first saw octopress back in the day, it was a blogging theme for Jekyll and that wasn't all that attracted to me because like, well, I can, you know, I can do a theme and I understand Jekyll. And so, you know, what does it bring aside? I really loved your code folding thing when you hover over this code and it unfolds the page.

So you don't think that was right. I kind of wanted that on my blog, but this sounds more like, I mean, man, the Ferrari thing makes sense. And once you have some context, because it sounds like a bunch of tools sitting on top of Jekyll, making it just more, uh, nice to work with, um, you, you have to do less plumbing yourself, but then you can build your own tools and integrate them into the system. So it almost feels like a layer on top, um, as opposed to just a starter thing.

I'm curious if there's theming involved as well. I'm kind of, oh, we'll get to that. I think there is. But yeah, this, this take on it.

Maybe this was what Autopress has been. I mean, obviously it's a new architecture, but maybe some of these things were there from the beginning. And I just didn't see the light because I just thought it was just a blogging theme, uh, sounds like the scope has, you know, has changed or, um, you're, you're kind of just speaking about parts that maybe I wasn't privy to previously. Also it didn't have the option to deploy and it did have new page themes and some of the, you know, or, um, yeah, systems didn't have a templating system for pages.

And so if you wanted to, you know, back in 2000, if you wanted to change what your default, uh, new posts or something looked like you had to edit the array file, like it's stupid stuff like that. And so I'm, you know, rebuilding a lot of these things and expanding the idea because now I've extracted a lot of this into something really small and I can say, I'm going to solve the problem of how do you, um, you know, publish a draft? Like what does that look like? What is the best user interface?

Because I could say, Oh yeah, uh, if you want to publish a post, just, you know, pass the path, you can do that. It'll accept the path, but it'll also accept a file name and if it can't find that file, it'll search in the post directory, you know, for file names that match that. So it's like, I'm just thinking, what is the nicest user interface? Because that's, see, I'm a designer at heart.

That's why this has been such a big learning process for me. Um, and so a lot of my interest is, um, making something that feels like it respects me as I use it and, um, and so some of the fun for me is just saying, you know, what is I have this one tiny thing that I'm working on? How can I make this as nice as possible? And that's also why it's taking me a long time.

So another cool thing, um, it's, it, Octopress isn't just about working with your Jekyll site. It's also about open source around Jekyll. And so I've written some other cool things. One is fun.

Uh, do you guys ever use a Ruby debugger? Yeah. Like a, like a command line one? Sure.

Pry, pry, bibug, uh, something like that. Cool. So Octopress brings that to Jekyll templates. So there's a, um, Octopress, uh, debugger, uh, gem that you can install and allows you to, uh, I don't know if you're familiar with liquid, but it's like mustache percent and then whatever, uh, percent mustache.

So you can say, you can add a debug tag in a poster page and you can actually like step through a loop as liquid builds your site and stuff for people who are, and it, you know, it goes to the command line so you can like test, you know, local variables, you can do all kinds of cool stuff and see what's happening. And so as you're working on plugins, you can use Octopress debugger to say, you know, what's happening here, why isn't this freaking working? Instead of having to like figure out how to, you know, write stuff to a file and then read the file or things are breaking, it's just so much easier. Um, there's also a under, uh, on GitHub on, I'm at this clash, C-L-A-S-H.

There's a, uh, gem called clash. It has a command line and it's all about a testing framework for Jekyll, which I wrote in order to make it a lot easier to write these, uh, all these cool plugins frameworks. And what it does is it, uh, it has its own scaffolding and stuff. So you can easily get started with a new, uh, Jekyll, um, project.

So if you want to create a gem that adds some nice features to Jekyll, you can use clash to build the Jekyll site and compare, uh, generated, uh, pages to whatever you're expected. So you just, um, you know, set up your plugin, let's say it's a liquid tag or something, generate your Jekyll site and then say, okay, this is how I expected the look. You just, you can run a command that just says, accept those changes and it will, um, create, you know, test files and stuff that match how it looks. And then it'll, it'll run deaths against that stuff.

And so you'll see these nice little death outputs when you're running it. And I test basically everything I've written with that. It's pretty cool. Huh.

Yeah. So I'm on auto-press, GitHub.com slash auto-press. And it looks like you have dozens of, uh, repos here, several pages. Yeah.

Several pages of. There's about 30 repos. So you got code blocks, syntax highlighting, you got ink, which is a core component for building, gem-based Jekyll teams, little foot fancy, footnote, popovers with native JavaScript for any Jekyll site. All sorts of things out here as a pipeline.

Yeah. Hello. Yeah. Uh, so yeah, there's a cool social share, but I'll talk.

Yeah. So a little foot is a thing I released recently, because you probably guys have probably seen Bigfoot, JS. I got a big foot on my blog. All right.

So basically I don't want everybody to have J query who wants to have nice footnotes on their Jekyll site. Yes. And so any Jekyll site you have, you can just add, um, octopus, little foot, and it will use all native JavaScript and it basically does the same thing that big foot does, and it comes with out sheets and everything that are automatically integrated into your site. I'm putting that in my blog this weekend.

Yeah. Check it out. Cool. Let me know how it goes for you.

I will. So you're using Jekyll, dude. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay.

Oh, yeah. I missed that part. Okay. My personal site has been Jekyll and my company's website is Jekyll site.

That one's on GitHub pages. My personal site is just on an old dream host account because, uh, but yeah, it's been on Jekyll for years and, you know, over time, I, so I heard you mentioned Jekyll earlier. I just didn't know that you said that your blog was in Jekyll. I just guess I didn't put two together.

Yeah. Honestly, over time it's lost its luster. I sometimes dread aspects of changing changes to my sites. I don't write very often and I try to blame that on Jekyll, even though it's not really his fault.

Um, so some of the stuff in Akka Press is really starting to take. I'll tell you both of you a little bit. What's that? The male perspective and it's a person.

You both like the person because he got a Ferrari and he, he stops me from blogging. I don't think somebody I know that's he's my way. If you're going to not, if you're going to not vlog, do it on a static site because that's right. We're about having to update things, getting hacked.

So oh my god. Jared, you pointed out, I guess you googled that. No, so in our back channel, we were talking previously about the web 2.0 show. Adam found the link and he placed it in the Skype back channel.

Um, and Skype went out and you know, Skype tries to get fancy now and they go out and they grab a preview of the page with the page title. I hope I'm not saying too much, you're Adam. But not cool, but it was some, uh, some, some, his old WordPress items, I'm assuming. Yeah, it's a WordPress site.

I've been meaning to make it back forever now, but it's like the lowest thing on my total poll to do. He pays me a link to it just so we have it for the show notes and it's advice to throw without prescription. Oh, yeah, right in this page title. So I said, yeah, you got hacked.

This is an un-18 WordPress site. It still runs, which is great, but as the problem is, it still runs, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, so, yeah, that's, that's bad news there. So we did find a link to that GitHub stuff from way back in the day. Don't visit the site because you might get a malware machine. No, maybe.

Just don't pick any other files. Hey, my worst ever was, um, I think some gallery plug-in for WordPress. Someone ended up installing some kind of, uh, backdoor system for hacking banks on my shared PHP out. So I was like, Oh, okay, let's get rid of this thing as quickly as possible.

I do not want to get in big trouble. No doubt. So, uh, since we're talking about some of the repos on the Octopress org, one that I see, um, that's lacking. And you can tell me why is the Docker one.

Is there an image? Is there not an image as a read me? Oh, that's not actually me. Uh, that's, uh, Jordan who also works on Jekyll, uh, said he wanted to create an Docker image for Octopress.

I said, go for it. So I created him a repo and gave him some permission. So, uh, okay. Okay.

So it's, it's coming then. It's got, I see you got the committers. I got you to blame. Yeah.

Go ahead. Blame. I'm like, I'll, I'll go. There's plenty of other goodies in there that we're talking about.

I say that's because only because of the getting started, we talked about earlier, which is how it, how much work it takes to get started with the old version of Octopress, um, you know, having Ruby, not having, you know, all these different scenarios here and Docker obviously flattens that playing field quite a bit. So if there was Docker out there and all you had to do was have Docker on machine and you could pretty much have an environment ready to go to run this new Octopress site and really make it, uh, a top of the line for Ari. Yeah. The, the, the cats working on Jekyll are really, um, excited about getting Jekyll on Docker and I think everybody kind of wants to make it so much easier to get started with this stuff, because I mean, a lot of governments use Jekyll for their sites and it would be awesome for people to just want to have a site that they don't have to worry about managing an admin interface for and updating stuff like that.

They just want it to be really simple. It'd be great for them to have an easy way to install that. I still don't think that Docker isn't an easy way to do everything yet, but it's getting close. I mean, you know, it's, it is getting closer.

It is getting closer. One step. I mean, one of the reasons I was really excited about building a CLI for Octopress is just because that allows people to do all kinds of extra things, you know, it's, it's easier to write a GUI or something on top of that. Anything that can just farm commands out to Octopress.

Uh, it just opens it up more. So, um, but yeah, there's some other cool stuff in here. Um, so let's see. What are some of your favorites?

So you're going to tell us. You're going to tell me the most joy. Oh, well, yeah, I'll take with the coolest one. It has the least docs right now because actually the docs are in another folder.

They're not in the read me, um, but Octopress Inc is freaking awesome. It is the theming system for Jekyll. And the, the Jekyll containers are basically in the, they have a Jekyll talk, I think it's like, talk. Jekyll RV.com, um, where they're saying, yes, people should be using Inc if they want to do Jekyll theming.

Uh, and it's, it's the main reason that I haven't put the final, um, yes. Uh, Octopress 3 is out. And this is exactly what we should do to use it post upon Octopress or, um, because I'm not quite done and I want to go documentation in. So, um, Octopress Inc is a system for making it really easy to write plugins, um, for a Jekyll site.

So it handles the asset pipeline management. It handles, uh, it adds CLI commands for working with your plugin. So for example, on that, uh, little foot jazz thing, that is built on Octopress Inc and when you install that, you'll put a, um, CSS asset tag and jazz, asset tag, liquid tag on your, uh, in your head or foot or wherever you want to put it. And Octopress Inc will generate a, um, finger printed, uh, compressed style sheet and JavaScript, uh, and inject the, you know, script tag and stuff in that place and it'll put it on your site.

Uh, you can also manage the compression settings and stuff. You can say, I want all plugins to generate their own, uh, files. You can troubleshoot stuff really easily, but basically you have, uh, you know, once you install that, you have any, any Octopress Inc plugin you install automatically gets combined into a single, um, style sheet of JavaScript and it's based on your gem load order or whatever. Also the, uh, the, the Octopress asset pipeline adds, um, as your own local style sheets and stuff to that asset pipeline, which is nice.

But the, uh, the cool thing also about all this is that, um, when you're using Octopress Inc, you have, uh, each plugin has its own configuration. And so you can run like Octopress Inc list and it will show you all the plugins you have installed in the command line and with information about them and what assets they come with. So you can include JavaScript style sheets. Um, you can use copy script or SAS.

You can do, uh, you know, images pages, you can use generators that, uh, can create index pages with pagination, uh, it's all multi-language, but yeah, it's other cool when, uh, Octopress multi-lingual lets you do multi-lingual. There's more. Yeah, so there were so many things and they're all really cool. Like the multi-language stuff is super neat.

If you have a site that you want to post in multiple languages, you can have separate feeds, separate indexes, uh, tags, indexes, uh, category index, like all these kinds of cool things, um, for, for whatever languages you are, uh, writing about and, um, let's see, uh, oh yeah. And so with Octopress Inc, you can also run a command that will generate a plugin scaffold that is a gem and all you have to do, like if you wanted to put out some JavaScript and style sheets, like that's, that you just want to write a theme or something, all you have to do is dump those into a JavaScript directory and a Southeast directory and then you can bundle up the theme and send it. And when somebody installs that, that automatically gets installed to their asset pipeline. Very nice.

It's really cool. A lot of these stuff lots of goodies. Well, let's take a break here. We'll hear from a sponsor, uh, on the backside of the sponsor break, we will talk perhaps about the roadmap to 3.0, what steps have been taken, what steps don't need to be taken.

They will try to pin him down on a release date for this thing. Let's take a break and we're back. You've heard me talk about top tile several times on podcast, but today is different. I've got a special treat for you.

I went out and spoke with a listener who a year ago had never heard of top tile. He listened to the show just like you're doing right here, right now, today, and heard us talk about top tile with her all about, and he decided to get in touch. And now he's living the dream as a freelance software developer with top tile. His name is Dean, he loves on, and I sit down and I talk with him.

I said, Hey, what is it that you love most about top tile? Take a listen. Well, for me, the thing about top tile, which I thought would be very hard for me personally, as I transitioned to a more consulting role, uh, was the way I would have access to new clients and what quality of those would be. So I found that I've had access to awesome clients through top tile and it hasn't been that hard to find because they have a lot of choice.

And even more than that, uh, there's enough choice and I can actually be a little selective about what kinds of things I want to be working on. So I use that as a way to sort of hone my skills and, you know, go towards the technology that I think are worth investing in for the future. So whether it's, you know, including you front and frameworks or doing a little DevOps work on the side, I usually am able to find clients who are, uh, have the needs of the things I want to get better at. That's been, that's been truly useful.

All right. That was Daniel Lozon, a listener of the change log and also a freelance software developer with top tile. If you want to follow in Daniel's footsteps, go to toptown.com slash developers. That's T O P T A L dot com slash developers to learn more about what top house all about and tell them the cheese log cinch.

All right. We are back talking about Octopress with Brandon Mathis Brandon. You had on a recent blog post on the Octopress dot org, uh, an announcement about Octopress 3.0 is coming. This was in January.

We're recording this in June. Still not here. That's all right. Software is hard and you have been releasing all sorts of goodies along the way.

Um, but she also published a release plan and in that plan, uh, you have kind of six steps is to a 3.0 release. Curious where you're at, uh, with things. Step one was finished. Octopress Genesis, um, you had right in migration guides that three was moved the master branch to the legacy branch, um, switch to a GitHub work, which is on that, obviously, and then new doc site and then release octopress as 3.0 and octopress ink as 1.0 where you are in that release plan.

Uh, so basically I am at, well, I still have to move. I'm at this octopress to the octopress work right now. I just have to repose and I really don't want to have that open anymore. Um, even though I was confused about that, I wasn't never sure which one was the canonical.

Yeah. Well, octopress, octopress will be the conical, uh, but it isn't now. Well, I mean, it is for three other. Oh, so it's only for legacy then.

Right. That's and so that'll be a branch or something on whatever the current one or on octopress. So, um, I still need to do that. And it's just kind of one of those things where I want to have the migration guide written and published so that when people are like trying to figure out how to clone this thing and run this stuff that, you know, the site needs to be done for that to happen.

All the stars will turn to the heat mail. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

I got to, it's, it's a little bit, um, overwhelming, uh, given the popularity of the current version of octopress try to make some of these changes. And, uh, I still hear from people who are, they have no idea that this is happening, even though there's a post that I need to do a better job of communicating about it. But anyway, um, that's why I'm here. So the, uh, talk about the doc site actually is one of the other cool things that I forgot to mention that octopress CLI does.

Um, so if you have a bunch of gems installed that are octopress gems, or even if you guys write gems and, uh, you can add a little snippet of code that will register them with documentation, so you can run octopress docs from the command line and it'll launch a Jekyll site that has the documentation will suck in the read me and the change log and you can add additional docs pages as well for any of the plugins you have installed on your site. So you can read without having to go to GitHub, it's all local, you know, installed in your gems, you can read all the documentation for everything installed. And so I'm using that same system of collecting documentation from, um, gems and repositories and stuff for building the site and so everything that, you know, all of the plugins I have, their documentation is in to read me. And some of them, if they have additional things like, you know, walkthroughs or things like that, they can put that in the, uh, there's a docs directory that octopress, uh, creates if you're creating ink plugin or you can anyway, those are all like implementation details, but basically you can easily add documentation to different gem plugins.

And that's what the new site is going to use. And so finishing that is, uh, currently happening and I am trying to finish up the new default theme because the power of the default theme surprises me. As you guys mentioned, yes. So I really want to get this to be a lot better, um, to be really nice.

Is it a redesign or a real line? Oh, it's, well, it's all, it's just all starting over. I mean, it's what development has changed so much. You know, we're all using SVG stuff or whatever.

Now there's just better ways of doing things. Um, and so I'm trying to embrace a lot of that and come up with a nice looking thing that people want to use that has a lot of flexibility, you know, people like these large image headers and stuff like that. I want to make it easy to add those to posts and it's a lot of it is just kind of deciding, you know, I've built something that works, but I kind of want to rip it apart and do it again a little bit, which is, it's, you know, it seems like you would do that. Yeah.

Um, not a bad way, but you seem like you have a high threshold for satisfaction. Like you, uh, you want things to be really, really good. And that's good. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think it's a hard thing to do. It's like, I'm combining, uh, I've written so many special liquid tags, just making them easier, things that, uh, like conditionally render a, a partial based on some configuration. Um, and, you know, there's so many different things that happen under the hood in a template just to generate good HTML, um, and getting all of that so that it's easy for somebody to work with. I'm thinking about how the user will come to this.