HPSTR Theme for Octopress

This is a port of the HPSTR Theme by mmistakes for Octopress. The theme was initially built for Jekyll and Less; this theme is written entirely in Sass and makes use of the Octopress 2.0 blogging framework.

Preview

To see a live preview of the theme, check out mmistakes's live Jekyll version. You can also feel free to check out blog.jez.io which currently uses the HPSTR theme for Octopress (you can also check out the source of this repo to get a feel for getting the theme to work with an Octopress installation.)

Installation

Walkthrough

Hey you with the trigger happy command line

Before you run the following commands, if you already have an Octopress theme installed, you may want to move your source/ and sass/ folders to source.bak/ and sass.bak/, respectively. During the Octopress installation process, any residual files from old themes that are not overwritten can pollute your source directory and cause confusing build errors. To avoid this, simply back up these files and restore those specific files which are specific to your blog (i.e., special pages you may have introduced and all of your _posts/ directory, among other files).

Installing themes in Octopress 2.0 is done using the .themes directory of your project.

$ cd your-octopress-blog
$ git submodule add https://github.com/jez/hpstr-theme.git .themes/hpstr
$ rake install['hpstr']
$ rake generate

Note

If the rake commands don't work, you may have to try bundle exec rake, depending on how you have ruby installed on your system.

Setting up your _config.yml, config.rb, and Gemfile

This theme requires a lot of changes to your _config.yml, which are all documented here. Make sure you check it out and add the new required fields.

For the stylesheets to be loaded properly, you need to configure Compass to generate your static file assets into the source/ folder. This can be done in config.rb. By prefixing all the output paths (css_dir in particular) with 'source/', Compass will know that it should actually place the generated files inside of folders within the source/ directory. To give an example, my config.rb contains the lines:

css_dir = "source/stylesheets"
sass_dir = "sass"

This tells Compass to look in the folder sass/ for scss files, and to place them inside source/stylesheets/ when the css files are compiled. Once inside the source/stylesheets directory, running rake generate will take care of moving them into public/.

Octopress unfortunately ships with an out-of-date version of Compass. This theme uses features of Compass that are not available in the version it ships with, namely the file "compass/css3/animation". To fix this, edit the line in your Gemfile that begins with

  ...
  gem "compass", ~> ...
  ...

to one of the following (depending on whether you want cutting edge updates or a more restricted update schedule, respectively).

  ...
  gem "compass"
  ...

# OR

  ...
  gem "compass", "~> 1.0.1"
  ...

If you don't get this, you will get an error like

error sass/screen.scss (Line 15: File to import not found or unreadable: compass/css3/animation.)

Once you do this, re-run bundle update to get the updated version of Compass.

Features

MathJax

To enable MathJax on a post or page, include mathjax: true in the front matter for a page. You can see the default MathJax configurations in mathjax.html.

What Next

There are a lot of cool things you can do after installing HPSTR for Octopress.

Get blogging!

After installing this theme, especially on a fresh Octopress blog, you should be able to start blogging right away. If you can't, let me know in an issue. I'd love to see if I can help you troubleshoot or to fix bugs in my handiwork.

Read the docs!

You can read about the Sass documents here, and about the various properties that are used throughout the configuration files and front matter here. I really care about well documented code, so if there's something you think could be explaned better or you need help navigating something, please submit an issue or send me a message on Twitter.

Submit Pull Requests!

I didn't port every feature to Octopress. Instead, I focused mostly on just those which I thought I would personally use. If you like this theme but I left out your favorite feature, be sure to fork this repo, add in your feature in a separate feature branch, and submit a pull request.

Use SSL!

If you're hosting on GitHub Pages, you're in luck! GitHub Pages now supports SSL. This works even if you're on a custom domain if you sign up for the CloudFlare free tier.

Octopress 3.0

Octopress 3.0 is in the works! This release, however, is going to be vastly different from Octopress 2.0. In Octopress 3.0, Octopress Ink will become the method through which themes are created, distributed, and updated, leaving the old method of creating themes used by version 2.0 behind.

Until version 3.0 becomes generally available, you've got a couple of options. The first is obviously to download Octopress 2.0, install HPSTR, and start blogging. This is certainly a viable option, and I'm more than willing to help you if you run into glitches.

The second is to start a Jekyll blog, perhaps by forking mmistakes's HPSTR Theme, and start using the Octopress 3.0 release candidates to manage your blog. As imathis has admitted, as of the time of this writing these release candidates are not a finished product, which may leave users feeling unsatisfied.

The third option is to wait it out. This certainly doesn't solve the immediate problem of wanting to get a blog up and running, but it has some unique advantages. For one, you don't have to dabble with a buggy and bloated 2.0 codebase. Additionally, by waiting for Octopress Ink to come out and waiting for HPSTR to be ported to it, installing new themes and updating them at any time will likely be a cinch.

I'm sure that there are many more options, not the least of which is to go build your own blogging platform, but these three are pretty good all things considered. Pick whichever you feel best meets your wants and needs.

License

HPSTR for Octopress Copyright (C) 2014 Jacob Zimmerman

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.