Helpful Octopress Resources

As I outlined in a recent post, I switched this site from Wordpress to the excellent Octopress blogging framework. I couldn’t be happier with the switch and I’m not surprised that others feel the same. There were several blog posts that were helpful in convincing me to move to Octopress and also in helping ease the transition. I would like to commend some of these articles to you now, especially if you are considering Octopress for your blog.

Blogging with Octopress by Matt Gemmell is a very helpful post that documents his reasons in moving from Wordpress to Octopress and gives some useful configuration and workflow tips. I really identified with almost all of Matt’s points and found they mirrored much of my own experience.

Switching to Octopress by Mark Nichols outlines how he went about switching from Wordpress to Octopress. A big portion of the article outlines the process of migrating a significant amount of Wordpress content into Markdown files. This is a must read if you plan on migrating from Wordpress.

Forking Octopress, also by Mark Nichols details how he forked the Octopress Github repository instead of just cloning it. This has allowed him to issue pull requests to the Octopress master so that he can contribute his work back to the project. I’m not contributing back yet but it is something I would like to do in the future, and so this was very helpful in that regard.

Since Octopress is built upon Github’s Jekyll, the more you know about Jekyll, the better. How to Use Jekyll is a great tutorial from Nettuts+ that will walk you though creating a very basic static blog with Jekyll.

If you’re not familiar with Markdown, then you might find this Markdown cheat sheet helpful as well.

Of course, the official Octopress site is a fantastic resource and is probably the best place to start looking if you’re interested in learning more.

Finally, if I can offer any assistance, please get in touch and I’d be happy to do so.