You should really read over the [Jekyll wiki](http://wiki.github.com/mojombo/jekyll) because most of your work will be using Jekyll. Beyond that Octopress is mostly some rake tasks, HAML, and SASS/Compass that has been meticulously crafted for ease of use and modification.
Generates the site and then uses rsync (based on your configurations in the Rakefile) to synchronize with your web host. In order to use rsync you'll need shell access to your host, and you'll probably want to use your public key for authentication.
*There are more but these are the ones you'll use the most. Read the Rakefile if you want to learn more*
## Style Configuration
### What you need to know
Octopress's stylesheets are written in [SASS](http://sass-lang.com). If you haven't learned SASS, you should. It's the future. Octopress also uses [Compass](http://compass-style.org) which is a framework for SASS and contains a great library of SASS mixins which make it trivial to write complicated CSS. This is also the future.
Edit the variables at the top of /stylesheets/_layout.sass to configure the primary structural dimensions, including the header, footer, main content, and sidebar.
Octopress puts a strong focus on readability and borrows some concepts from the [better web readability project](http://code.google.com/p/better-web-readability-project/). As a result the base font size is 16px. Don't worry though, if you don't like that, you can simply change the variable !base\_font\_size at the top of /stylesheets/_typography.sass and all of the other typographic math (heading sizes, line-heights, margins, etc) will be resized to suit automatically.
If you want to add or modify site-wide typography, this is the file to do it in. If your changes are specific to a small section or feature of your site, you should probably add that under *Partials*.
Octopress ships with a typography test page /test/typography.html that lets you preview the default typographic styles, and see how your changes affect them.
Every color used in Octopress is assigned to a variable in _theme.sass, so you can change them to suit your tastes without having to dig through a bunch of files to find the color your looking for. Also the colors variables are grouped by their location in the site layout to make them easier to find.
These are the styles for subsections of the site. They're located in /stylesheets/partials and each subsection has it's own file. Here you'll find styles for the sidebar, blog posts, syntax highlighting, and specific page elements that don't belong in the base layout files.
Octopress ships with a syntax highlighting test page /test/syntax.html that lets you preview the default syntax highlighting styles, and see how your changes affect them.
