So a few days ago I manned up and decided to finally write planet.rb, mainly because I need to have a way of merging several blogs into one in a tidy way. This evening (while on a furious caffeine high) I thought of a slightly different application for the gem.

Octopress is awesome, and you should use it.

In the last few weeks I’ve been using Octopress a lot, its a fully customizable blogging engine that just gives you controll of everything. It’s also powered by the mighty Jekyll, the gem that is also responsible for github pages.

The process to set up Octopress is simple, and described perfectly in it’s documentation, you basically install a few dependencies, clone the repository, and you are ready to start writing blog posts and deploy your blog to github or via rsync to a private vps.

That is kinda neat, but I’m using { wordpress || blogger || whatever }

Exactly, and you really shouldn’t, that’s where planet.rb comes into play.

Import your blog using its RSS/Atom feed

Once you have followed the Octopress Docs to the point where you already have a cloned empty blog, simply install planet.rb with

 gem install planet 

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▸ planet init
=> Created default planet.yml

You will want to open the planet.yml file and put only your blog feed (as an example, the feed for this blog is http://blog.poteland.com/atom.xml) and your name as author, you can just put an empty string (”) for your picture, as we won’t be using that.

We will also need to empty the author.html template file so that it doesn’t put up an unnecessary picture of you. Do it with this command

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▸ > source/_layouts/author.html

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▸ planet generate

That’s it! planet.rb will pick up your blog, process the posts and save them in Octopress’s source/_posts/ directory. After that continue with the Octopress setup guide, with all your posts already on it. Congratulations on joining the Octopress community! :)