Upgrading to Octopress 3

I thought it might be useful to show how I set up the blog with Octopress 3 as Daniel Westhinde expressed an interest.

Octopress was a really great blog generation tool for the time. Unfortunately, Octopress 3.0 has not had the documentation support it really needs to make it clear how to work with Jekyll.

The long and the short of it is that I found it much easier to create a new Octopress 3.0 site, and slowly move the content over until I had a handle on how Jekyll worked.

The following blogs also proved useful:

The kicker for Octopress is that many of the plugins that worked for Octopress 2 were not quite working in Octopress 3. As such, the plugins list looks very different, and contains multiple tweaks. In the interests of clarity, I'm going to show my Gemfile so you can see the list I ended up with:

Note the comments in Gemfile talking about compatibility fixes.

The _config.yml file is not all that different. I had to rewrite all the links so that they had a blog prefix as I moved them and couldn't find an automatic rewriter that I was happy with.

The _deploy.yml file did not change.

The biggest problem was finding a Jekyll theme I could live with and fixing the redirect links. I eventually settled on Hydeout and tweaked it a bit. The disqus comments also got in the way, so I've hidden them by default.

Running the actual blog is pretty straightforward:

  • To create a new blog post, it's bundle exec octopress new post "New Post Title".
  • To preview the website, it's bundle exec jekyll serve.
  • To publish to Github Pages, JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec octopress deploy.

The HTTPS support is managed through Cloudflare, so github pages goes through a proxy so it looks like a real website instead of coming from Github.

I think that's it!

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