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--- layout: post title: "Moving to Octopress - time to customize your blog" date: 2013-02-16 22:56 comments: true categories: [octopress] cover: /images/cover/avatar.png keywords: wordpress, octopress, seo, facebook, twitter, git, guide, howto, plugins description: Installing and customizing octopress blog --- I've been a long-time [Wordpress](http://wordpress.com) user. Easy blogging -- want to write a new post? Click there and there and you can start writing. Too easy and boring for hackers. Welcome to [Octopress](http://octopress.org/) blogging (and reserve a few hours before starting blogging :) ). It is really helpful if you know Git, HTML and [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown). Installing and setup is really easy (the official guide is [here](http://octopress.org/docs/)). What will probably take a long time is customization. You can do whatever you want to. No more restrictive wordpress/blogger/... 0. recommendation: Learn from others. This site is open source. My [Git](http://git.cinan.sk/octopress.git/). 1. recommendation: Read this superb [ewal](http://www.ewal.net/2012/09/08/octopress-customizations/) guide. It describes how to remove "blog" slug in URL; how to create categories list; how to use fancybox gallery for images in articles; how to notify Google and Bing about updating your site and some other things. 2. recommendation: SEO fixes. [Here](http://www.yatishmehta.in/seo-for-octopress). 3. recommendation: Setup 404 pages in Nginx. [Here](http://blog.bigdinosaur.org/custom-error-pages/) 4. recommendation: Autopublish new articles on Facebook, Twitter and others sites. Sign up for [ifttt.com](https://ifttt.com/) and create a recipe. 5. recommendation: Add [Open Graph](http://ogp.me/) meta tags to your source/\_includes/head.html. Useful if you want to publish your posts on Facebook or Reddit. These tags will set appearance of links on Facebook (and maybe other sites). [Facebook debugger](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) will check your settings. {% img center /images/opengraph.png Facebook and Open Graph meta tags %} This is my source/_includes/head.html (notice "description", "keywords" and opengraph tags on lines 30-35)": {% codeblock source/_includes/head.html lang:html %}{% raw %} <!DOCTYPE html>   <html class="no-js" lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>{% if page.title %}{{ page.title }} - {% endif %}{{ site.title }\}</title> <meta name="author" content="{{ site.author }}"> {% capture description %}{% if page.description %}{{ page.description }}{% else %}{{ site.description }}{% endif %}{% endcapture %} <meta name="description" content="{{ description | strip_html | condense_spaces | truncate:150 }}"> {% capture keywords %}{% if page.keywords %}{{ page.keywords }}{% else %}{{ site.keywords }}{% endif %}{% endcapture %} <meta name="keywords" content="{{ keywords }}">  <meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True"> <meta name="MobileOptimized" content="320"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> {% capture canonical %}{{ site.url }}{% if site.permalink contains '.html' %}{{ page.url }}{% else %}{% if page.url contains site.category_dir %}/{% endif %}{{ page.url | remove:'index.html' }}{% endif %}{% endcapture %} <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical }}"> <link href="{{ root_url }}/favicon.png" rel="icon"> <link href="{{ root_url }}/stylesheets/screen.css" media="screen, projection" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> <script src="{{ root_url }}/javascripts/modernizr-2.0.js"></script> <script src="{{ root_url }}/javascripts/ender.js"></script> <script src="{{ root_url }}/javascripts/octopress.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <link href="{{ site.subscribe_rss }}" rel="alternate" title="{{site.title}}" type="application/atom+xml"> {% include custom/head.html %} {% include google_analytics.html %} <meta property="og:site_name" content="{{ site.title }}"> <meta property="og:type" content="article"> <meta property="og:url" content="{{ site.url }}{{ page.url }}"> <meta property="og:image" content="{{ site.url }}{% if page.cover %}{{ page.cover }}{% else %}{{ site.cover }}{% endif %}"> <meta property="og:title" content="{% if page.title %}{{ page.title }} - {% endif %}{{ site.title }}"> <meta property="og:description" content="{{ description }}"> </head> {% endraw %}{% endcodeblock %}