Octopress on ZeroSharp

Moving from Octopress to Hugo

Sat, 02 May 2026 08:00:00 +0100

I have converted this whole blog from Octopress to Hugo and modernised the theme.

I haven’t blogged in a while, and the prospect of getting Octopress to build on a modern machine had become its own deterrent. So before I could write anything, I had to do something about the platform. But I’m not sure I would ever have bothered until Claude Code made things easy.

Removing the RSS subscription icon from Octopress

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 09:13:00 +0100

A fellow Octopress blogger recently asked how I removed the RSS subscription icon from the Octopress navigation bar.

First, create a new site variable show_feeds by adding a line to the _config.yml file which is in the root folder of the Octopress source.

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# _config.yml
 # RSS / Email (optional) subscription links (change if using something like Feedburner)
+ show_feeds: false
 subscribe_rss: http://feeds.feedburner.com/zerosharp
 subscribe_email:
 # RSS feeds can list your email address if you like
 email:

Then modify the source/_includes/navigation.html as follows

Clone your Octopress to blog from two places

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:59:00 +0100

This post covers how recreate a local repository of your Octopress blog. Perhaps you’ve accidentally lost it, or perhaps you would like to be able to blog from two different places. Recently I bought a new computer and I wanted to be able to blog from both my desktop and my laptop.

How Octopress works

Octopress repositories have two branches, source and master. The source branch contains the files that are used to generate the blog and the master contains the blog itself.

Installing Ruby with Homebrew and rbenv on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 17:38:00 +0100

Install Ruby with rbenv

I decided to setup Octopress on my Mac so that I can publish blog posts from either Windows or MacOS. I’m on OS X 10.8.2.

I tried to follow the Octopress instructions for installing Ruby but ran into a few problems.

Install Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for OS X. Open Terminal and install Homebrew with:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

Once the installation is successful, you can run the following command to check your environment.

My amateur git skills have lead to an RSS deluge

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 11:31:00 +0100

I was trying to upgrade to the latest Octopress version but it seems I did something with the atom.xml file and some of you got every single post as ’new’ in your RSS readers. Not sure what I did, but sorry for any extra mouse clicks. All working now.

Image captions for Octopress

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:56:00 +0100

I wanted to add captions to some of my images and came across this forum thread, from which I was able to piece together Ted Kulp’s slick solution.

The following markdown

 <figure>

Leonhard Euler

will render like this.

Leonhard Euler

It works with left and right too.

The changes

First, create the image_caption_tag plugin and put it in the plugins subfolder.

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# plugins/image_caption_tag.rb

# Title: Image tag with caption for Jekyll
# Description: Easily output images with captions

module Jekyll

 class CaptionImageTag < Liquid::Tag
 @img = nil
 @title = nil
 @class = ''
 @width = ''
 @height = ''

 def initialize(tag_name, markup, tokens)
 if markup =~ /(\S.*\s+)?(https?:\/\/|\/)(\S+)(\s+\d+\s+\d+)?(\s+.+)?/i
 @class = $1 || ''
 @img = $2 + $3
 if $5
 @title = $5.strip
 end
 if $4 =~ /\s*(\d+)\s+(\d+)/
 @width = $1
 @height = $2
 end
 end
 super
 end

 def render(context)
 output = super
 if @img
 "<span class='#{('caption-wrapper ' + @class).rstrip}'>" +
 "<img class='caption' src='#{@img}' width='#{@width}' height='#{@height}' title='#{@title}'>" +
 "<span class='caption-text'>#{@title}</span>" +
 "</span>"
 else
 "Error processing input, expected syntax: ![name(s)] /url/to/image [width height] [title text]]([class)"
 end
 end
 end
end

Liquid::Template.register_tag('imgcap', Jekyll::CaptionImageTag)

Next, modify the _utilities.scss file as follows.

Setting up Octopress on Windows Again

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:20:00 +0100

My very first blog post was about setting up Octopress. The following is an updated version of those instructions for setting up Octopress with Windows, ruby 1.9.3, python 2.7.3.

This is quick guide to setting up Octopress to publish to GitHub pages. I’m using Windows 8 64-bit, but the instructions should work with other versions of Windows.

Get with GitHub

First, get an account on GitHub and follow the excellent instructions for Windows here. here.

Incompatible character encodings when generating Octopress

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:26:00 +0100

I started getting an encoding error whenever I tried to generate my Octopress blog with rake generate. The error message was:

Liquid error: incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and IBM437

I tried to save all my recently modified files with UTF-8 encoding, but I couldn’t get the error to go away until I found a solution on this blog in Chinese.

Set two environment variables (via Control Panel/System/Advanced System Settings/Environment Variables) as follows:

Octopress on Windows and GitHub

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:11:00 +0100

There is a more recent version of this post which covers ruby 1.9.3, python 2.7.3.

— January 2013 update: http://blog.zerosharp.com/setting-up-octopress-on-windows-again Setting up Octopress on Windows again

---

This is quick guide to setting up [Octopress](http://octopress.org/) on a Windows 7 machine to publish to GitHub pages. It relies on ruby 1.9.2 and python 2.7.2.

Get with GitHub

First, get an account on GitHub and follow the excellent instructions for Windows here. here.