Abstract : Contrary to what you might be expecting, I’m not going to advocate switching to Octopress, but rather give a hand to those of you who would like to migrate from WordPress to Octopress via GitHub Pages hosting. By the way, this is (most probably) my last post on my WordPress blog. I have a new one (http://ingini.org/) hosted freely by GitHub and build with Octopress.
Goal : Migrating from WordPress to Octopress
Acknowledgement: My gratitude goes to the open source community and to the following people:
Rob Hunder – How to install Octopress on Ubuntu
Rob Dodson – Custom Domain With Octopress and Github Pages
Eric – How I built my blog in one day
Viggiosoft – Setting Up a Blog With Octopress
Before we begin, keep in mind that Internet is already full of different tutorials on Octopress and hosting via GitHub. Thus I will keep this post as short as possible and avoid repeating the same stuff which others have explained quite well (look at the links above and the Octopress on-line docs).
Step 1: Look around you
I encourage you to take a look at the posts I have carefully selected for you in the Acknowledgement section. They cover (almost) everything from setting up Octopress to deploying on your GitHub pages account. Don’t forget to check the Octopress documentation as well. In addition to the Acknowledgement section, there are plenty of resource out there, on how to set up a blog with Octopress and Jekyll. I’ve chosen Octopress because of the simple and straightforward way of building my blog. However, if you are interested in other ways to set up your blog, I invite you to check http://jekyllbootstrap.com/ and ruhoh.
Step 2: WordPress XML blog data extraction
Once you’ve done your initial research and installed the Octopress you’re probably wondering how to migrate your WordPress blog. I found a really simple and nice solution based on Exitwp. For this tool to work you need to extract your blog in an XML file. You can do this easily and for free via your WordPress account. Once you’ve logged, go to:
Dashboard -> Tools -> Export -> Export
Now that you have your blog in an XML file, read the short tutorial on https://github.com/thomasf/exitwp carefully because you may have to perform each and single step of it.
Step 3: Enjoy the Octopress
There is just one last thing to know: at the time of writing this post, the (git) master branch of Octopress is at version 1.* but there is also the branch 2.1 which resolves a lot of bugs and adds new features (for me 2.1 resolved some code highlighting problems). So although it’s not necessary you may want to update to the latest version by doing:
git checkout -b 2.1 git pull octopress 2.1 bundle install rake update rake generate
honeysoft 