I'm the maintainer of jekyll-bootstrap, nice to see this on HN!

My main focus is super-fast publishing (GitHub Pages) and technical blogging. I really could use some honest user feedback from technically-minded bloggers. What is most important to you? What features do you need to see?

I'm prioritizing API development. Simple and standardized api's put Open Source projects on the map imo. On that note I'm working on a theme and javascript api for JB.

Theme api allows designers to (easily) contribute great themes. This includes syntax highlighting (which is not themed yet =[)

Javascript plugin API will allow your blog to stretch its wings - arbitrary 3rd-party integration, optimizing content form (tabs, accordion, slides, etc) and..

I want to rollout a jekyll-blog network where users can log in, "follow", "like" etc just how tumblr, posterous, wordpress all have community integration.

Please let me know what is important to you. Thanks for your support!

-1 for "follow", "like" and all the other social things.

Imho the reason why people are not using tumblr/posterous/wordpress/etc. is not only on the publishing aspect: I guess (at least that's what on MY mind) that people want just simple things, for both writing and reading, without all that unnecessary "baggage" that other services provide.

We have a bajillions of places when can we like stuff, do we have so many places where can we read a post in peace? ;)

My main interest for 'quick technical blogging' would be nice and easy code formatting (C++ in my case), which seems to be irritatingly difficult in my blogging systems.

Not sure if that is the kind of comment you are interested in. How would I put some C++ code into a blog post?

Sadly I'm not familiar with C++ but yes this is definitely the feedback I'm looking for. I would imagine kickass, painless, and beautiful syntax highlighting would go a long long way for technical blogs. This is something I want to (but haven't yet) dedicate a lot of focus on assuming it would motivate more programmers to publish content.

Vanilla jekyll can highlight C++ using Coderay.

You can try the quality of the code highlighter here:

http://coderay.rubychan.de/rays

Really excited about it, but am stuck: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9133578/error-repository-...

I would love a rails plugin which gave me jekyll hosted blog for my rails app on heroku. I would even pay $20 for this.

What specifically did you need/want integrated with Rails? Do you mean you have a blog in rails and you want a way to automatically port it to Jekyll? Can you expand on your specific use case?

So I build an application in rails on herokou. All applications require a blog for SEO purposes. Heroku doesnt allow you to reroute or do anything at all to the webserver so your stuck using rails as your blog.

The best case scenario is to have a static blog so it serves fast and holds up the dyno for the least. Plus varnish can handle the load as its static.

So essentially I want a jekyll blog which commits to my source code and lives in say in public/ .

Use case: I write my blog post. Check it in and do a push to heroku. Voila its on my site.

I think all this is possible but you have to manually put in all the github hooks etc.

Everyone who uses heorku for hosting their crappy apps and even their good apps would use this...

Not a rails plugin, but earlier this month this was posted to HN :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428369

Thats awesome thanks.

Can you give us a breakdown/comparison to Octopress (http://www.octopress.org)?

Which I use for http://www.MikeSchroll.com and seems to have many similar goals (and also can be easily deployed to github pages, which is where I host mine)

(I maintain jekyllboostrap) Two main differences:

1) The core implementation difference is that Octopress is customized through Jekyll plugins whereas JB is customized through native liquid code.

2) JB's purpose is to build a standardized API for Jekyll Blogs. Octopress has no such api.

1) Has a few consequences. Since GitHub Pages does not run any plugins, Octopress basically pre-processes your website and then pushes the final rendered pages to GitHub for hosting. JB is able to just push your change itself and GitHub takes care of the Jekyll processing. This has a couple advantages. Firstly your codebase is cleaner (I'm a developer and that mattered to me =x) and secondly for larger blogs (imagine 1k posts) you are basically letting GitHub do all the work rather than preprocessing it yourself.

TBH the plugin thing has become something of a debate with me. I originally _challenged_ myself to not use plugins because I just wanted to make a damned blog, I didn't see why Liquid needed to be so damned difficult. So I'd thought I'd save other people the hassle of figuring out liquid. But I can see how people don't mind hosting a pre-processed website if it means getting what they want.

2) The plugin problem highlights the need for a stadardized api. It's very easy to use plugins to do everything you want for your blog. But your work doesn't benefit the larger community because there is not an established integration point for plugins. Jekyll is like 4 years old and there are a ton of plugins but nobody cares because its still too hard to get up and running. You need to read the docs for every single plugin to integrate it. Jekyll community is segmented exactly because of plugins imo.

With JB my (technical) goal is to build a common API for Jekyll-based blogs. An api for themes will mean plug-n-play theming. An api for javascript will mean badass javascript plugins that drop in. Ideally I'd like to make community support (js widget that allows people to follow, like, vote, explore, blogs etc).

Octopress supports nor advocates no such api. It has a (very nice) theme but no theme API so you can't just install a theme.

Honestly I think Octopress is a lot more fine-tuned at this point. But I'm trusting that once the APIs are solidified, you will see a larger community developed around the JB framework which collectively means everyone's experience will only improve.

I'd say stick with Octopress if you are comfortable customizing it to fit your needs. Go with JB if your main goal is to run a technical blog and (eventually) benefit from "JB community" improvements, themes, js plugins, etc.

Btw Brandon Mathis (https://github.com/imathis) has given me great advice on how he promoted octopress and made it into what it is today so I definitely take inspiration and respect his work =).

Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough reply. I only recently started using Jekyll/Octopress, had I known or yours I would've checked it out at the time; but yea - I think I'll stick with Octopress for now.

I do hear you though on the precompile vs github doing it -- I struggled a lot at first with the Octopress directions, especially after having read about jekyll processing support at github, to understand why it was making me precompile and put the compiled code in its own branch.

Furthermore I had to modify the jekyll source to make it work the way I wanted in the end: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/pull/337

I'm curious to see this go full-circle... Hosted Jekyll with point-and-click plugins, themes... which gives you a gui to edit your posts, and then you click to commit to github where it's generated and hosted!

It would be nice to see directions on how to host your blog on your own server instead of using Github. I assume these directions are lying around somewhere, so most likely it is sufficient to just link to them.

There's a deployment page that, I agree, can definitely use some work : http://jekyllbootstrap.com/usage/deployment-and-hosting.html

The link to the docs are at the bottom: (custom jekyll deployment strategies)

I described how you can host a Jekyll website on Heroku: http://bionicspirit.com/blog/2012/01/05/blogging-for-hackers...

Looks good. Minor nuisance - The "fork on github" banner covered up the sidebar for me. Well, not so much the banner but its transparent bounding box, preventing me from clicking the underlying links.

My screen width is 1280, but I had a side panel open in my browser, reducing the available space. Of course maximising things got rid of the problem, but why should I do that? :)

Maybe move it to the left? (either the banner or sidebar)

it works http://meeeu.github.com/

Nitpick, why do people insist on typing "$" for the shell prompt? It makes it impossible to copy/paste.

# or $ gives the reader an indication of what type of account should execute the command.

a good idea would to have it be part of the layout so highlighting it would only highlight the actual text you want to highlight ... hmmm! good idea ..

.line:before{ content:'$'; /* etc */ }

that should do it. you'd have to wrap each line in a tag though.

Yes, that would be ideal.