octopress

Octopress is a blogging framework built on top of Jekyll, a tool that generates static websites from plain text files. A static website does not run code on a server when someone visits it; instead, it consists of pre-built HTML pages that load quickly and require minimal hosting. Octopress takes the foundational pieces that Jekyll provides and wraps them in a polished setup with a ready-to-use theme and helpful automation.

Out of the box, Octopress gives you a clean, responsive theme written in semantic HTML5, meaning it is designed to read well on both desktop and mobile screens. Code publishing is treated as a first-class feature: you can embed syntax-highlighted code directly in blog posts, pulling from GitHub Gists, jsFiddle, or files on your own computer, with a color scheme called Solarized applied automatically.

The framework ships with built-in support for several common blogging services. You can connect it to Disqus for comments, Google Analytics for traffic tracking, Pinboard and Delicious for bookmarks, and GitHub Repositories to display your projects. A set of rake tasks, which are scripted commands you run from a terminal, simplifies the process of building and publishing the site so you do not have to handle those steps manually.

Note that this repository represents the older 2.x line of Octopress. At the time the README was last updated, version 3.0 was under development in a separate repository. The 2.x version shown here is no longer being actively developed, though the documentation site at Octopress.org covers its usage.

The project is open source under the MIT license, meaning you can use, modify, and distribute it freely. The author asks that users display a "Powered by Octopress" credit in their site footer if they want to support the project's visibility.