I've migrated away from Octopress and this site is now built using ToggleJS with a custom GulpJS file.
This article is Part 2 of 9 in a series about Migrating from BlogSpot to Octopress.
- Part 1 - Introduction
- Part 2 - (current) - Setup Octopress
- Part 3 - Export BlogSpot Content
- Part 4 - Import Content into Octopress
- Part 5 - Fix Links
- Part 6 - 301 Redirect Old Posts to New Location
- Part 7 - Setup a Custom Domain
- Part 8 - Redirect Atom/RSS in FeedBurner
- Part 9 - What's left?
Luckily for all of us, this post will be short as the Octopress Setup guide is a great place to start. Only additions I have to add are that I've set this up on both a Mac and a Windows 8 machine.
I had to execute the rake setup_github_pages[repo] on both machines. I should probably look under the abstraction and understand a little deeper - but I'll have to save that for later. For now I have work to do...
On my Mac:
- Things worked out quite smoothly on the Mac.
- This is where I ran my initial import of the blog (see later posts in the series).
On my Windows 8 machine:
- This environment seemed harder to get going
- The hardest part on Windows 8 was getting the right combination of ruby, ruby dev kit, and various other dependencies installed. The dependencies for Octopress installation are compatible with later versions of Ruby but the gems needed for blog import are only supported in Ruby 1.9.3 at the time of this writing. Since I don't use Ruby on Windows for anything else, I eventually ended up uninstalling all versions I'd previously had (including cleaning up any environment path variables). Re-installing just what I needed and eventually got it working. Another route is to use Scott Muc's yari which allows you to toggle the version of Ruby that you're using.
- Thanks to this post to get started on the windows. Some steps I excluded since I'd alredy setup the blog initially on my Mac.
Now I can use the power of git to manage my website and blog and I can leverage whatever development tools I would like depending on the platform. If you are new to Octopress it is helpful to study the documentation and structure of the files within your cloned repository. The first thing to note is that you have two branches in the repository: the source branch contains the Ruby scripts and utilities you will use to generate your blog content. The master branch is where your published content will live. The second thing to note is that while you can do the git integrations yourself for deploying the blog, it is best to stick to the RAKE task for deploying your content. This will automate copying your content to the _deploy subdirectory and pushing the update to the master branch.