What is Octopress?

Octopress gives developers a well designed starting point for a Jekyll blog. It's easy to configure and easy to deploy. Sweet huh?

Octopress comes with

A nice, easy to configure theme that focuses on readability.
Built in support for Twitter, Delicious, and Disqus Comments.
Rake tasks that make development fast, and deployment easy.

Why?

Building a Jekyll blog from scratch is a lot of work.
Jekyll doesn't have default layouts or themes.
Most developers don't want to do design.

Octopress is made of

Jekyll a blog aware static site generator (Henrik's fork adds HAML support)
Compass an awesome SASS framework
FSSM + a rake task, automatically regenerates the blog as you work
Serve for live previews of the site while in development
Rsync for easy deployment

Setup

First, clone Octopress locally.

git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git

Second, install required gems

sudo gem install henrik-jekyll
sudo gem install compass-edge
sudo gem install fssm
sudo gem install serve

Third

Edit the top of the Rakefile settings to match your web hosting info.
Edit the top of the atom.haml and _layout/default.haml.

Usage

You should really read over the Jekyll wiki 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.

Common Rake tasks

rake preview:
Generates the site, starts the local web server, and opens your browser to show the generated site.

rake watch:
Watches the source for changes and regenerates the site every time you save a file. You'll forget your working with a static site.

rake deploy:
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.

rake stop_serve:
Kills the local web server process.

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. If you haven't learned SASS, you should. It's the future. Octopress also uses Compass 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.

Customizing the default theme

The default theme is comprised of Layout, Typography, Theme, and Partials. Octopress also has a library of mixins that act like SASS helpers for styling tasks.

Layout
Edit the variables at the top of /stylesheets/_layout.sass to configure the primary structural dimensions, including the header, footer, main content, and sidebar.

Typography
Octopress puts a strong focus on readability and borrows some concepts from the 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.

Theme
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.

Partials
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.

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