[danso]

First of all, kudos to the OP for his work on Octopress...without it, I would've never gotten into Jekyll, and I would've never understood the joy and simplicity of static site development...trying out Octopress was one of the best things to happen to me as a (Rails) web developer.

The most surprising thing to me in the OP was seeing that Octopress users had been updating their sites all this time...I frequently checked back on the Octopress blog, and then the Git repo, to see how to go about doing that. I tinkered around playing with the dev branches but didn't know enough to get around their hiccups. Finally I gave up on it and just went to Jekyll, which was definitely a blessing in disguise, as it let me figure out more of the process of static site building, with fewer abstractions and conveniences in the way.

I don't know if I'll ever go back to Octopress -- I'm a devout Middleman user now -- but the direction it's taking seems to be the right one, and I'm amazed that the author, these past few years, is still cranking away at what could easily just be a legacy, soul-sucking project -- given the size of the userbase and the number of dependencies/upgrades involved in changing the code base.

[imathis]

Thanks for your story. I've heard that from so many people. That Octopress opened doors for them and exposed them to new interests. It's pretty much the best thing I could ask to hear. I love that I was able to be a part of that spark for people. So, thanks for sharing!

For what it's worth, I'm also a huge fan of Middleman. It's a great project and I use it for some things too. For a while, when Jekyll was in a dry spell, I considered building Octopress tools for Middleman as well, but in the end I prefer the simplicity of Jekyll.

Middleman is great, but it's too much like the view layer of Rails. To me, Jekyll feels more like the native web.