After 6 years using octopress, I’ve finally admitted it is dead. I decided to switch to plain jekyll which I should have done a long time ago. My only requirement was to change the URL format on the off chance anyone has ever linked to my blog. I also wanted an extremely simple theme that didn’t have tons of css I didn’t understand or need. I picked one called Beautiful Jekyll

Beautiful Jekyll is a ready-to-use template to help you create an awesome website quickly. Perfect for personal sites, blogs, or simple project websites. Check out a demo of what you’ll get after just two minutes. You can also look at his personal website to see it in use.

The process was very simple.

• Fork and clone Beautiful Jekyll
• Delete everything in _posts
• Delete everything except the _posts and the images from my old octopress site. Commit that to git.
• Copy the Beautiful Jekyll site over to mine, ignoring all the git related stuff. Commit that to git.
• Update _config.yml with the values for my blog
  • The most important change was to permalink to keep the octopress url format. It should be set to /blog/:year/:month/:day/:title/
• I installed html-proofer to look for broken external links and images.
  • gem 'html-proofer' in your Gemfile. Then bundle install and generate the site bundle exec jekyll build and run bundle exec htmlproofer ./_site. It found a lot of broken links some html issues as well.
• bundle exec jekyll serve and make sure it looks reasonable

To deploy I decided to set up Amazon Amplify which was also super easy. I pointed it to my public github repo and it recognized it as a jekyll site and configured Amplify to generate and deploy after every commit. Then I had Amplify take over the domain name from the s3 bucket that was configured before and everything was done.