Upgrading to Octopress 3 - Part 1

While Octopress 2 has been working okay-ish for me - still prefers it to a kitchen sink solution like WordPress. But I would be lying if it there is no frustration moments with it.

My main frustration is what usually happens when I come back to blogging from a long hiatus from blogging (few months usually):

  • run rake new post["hey-i-am-writing-again-after-few-months-hiatus"]
  • bundle complaints, can’t find gems required by Octopress (most likely gone when I upgraded Ruby).
  • Okay, sure run bundle install
  • run rake new post again then BAM! Errors, errors and errors, various different errors, my guess is my blog code is now out of date with the latest version of gems. For example: the latest error that I got is some obscured SASS error.

Maybe I just need to upgrade my Octopress? I think I tried to do it once long time ago - it wasn’t the easiest. Brandon Mathis (the author of Octopress) summed it up nicely:

{% quote author:“Brandon Mathis” url:http://octopress.org/2015/01/15/octopress-3.0-is-coming title:“Octopress 3.0 is coming” %} If I’m being harsh, I’ll tell you that as it is now, Octopress is basically some guy’s Jekyll blog you can fork and modify. The first, and most obvious flaw, is that Octopress is distributed through Git. I want to punch through a wall when I think about users wrestling with merge conflicts from updating their sites. It’s absurd. {% endquote %}

So Octopress 3 is coming out soon (well it’s been coming out soon since early 2015). But from what I read and based from my limited time using it, I think you could pretty much using it.

I really like how Octopress 3 is built, it makes sooo much more sense now - kudos for Brandon and team on what must be a difficult rewritting task.

So, if you are running Octopress 2, consider on moving to Octopress 3. It took me few hours to do and I feel pretty good about it as I know it will save me more hours from having to deal with bundle updates frustrations. I’ve chronicled my upgrade experience in this post

  • hope it helps.