Another quick tip for people using Octopress:

If you’re running Octopress on Mac OSX you may be running into some real performance issues when you run the rake preview command to check your posts locally before you run the rake deploy to get things up and running live. This is because, for whatever reason, the WEBrick server runs slowly on XCode 4.2+. I haven’t dived deep into finding a solution for this because I found a nice fix.

First, run gem install thin from your command line.

This command will install the Ruby Thin Server. This server is what I use for my Rails testing as well and it works exactly the way I want it to. (I have read many recommendations on using Pow as well, but I haven’t spent the time looking into it so I can’t personally recommend it yet.)

The next step is to change your Gemfile located in the top directory of your Octopress files. Simply add gem 'thin' to the development group and save the changes.

This is what your Gemfile should look like now if you’re running Octopress 2.0 without any changes up to this point:

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source "http://rubygems.org"

group :development do
  gem 'rake', '~> 0.9.2'
  gem 'rack', '~> 1.4.1'
  gem 'jekyll', '~> 0.11.2'
  gem 'rdiscount', '~> 1.6.8'
  gem 'pygments.rb', '~> 0.2.12'
  gem 'RedCloth', '~> 4.2.9'
  gem 'haml', '~> 3.1.6'
  gem 'compass', '~> 0.12.1'
  gem 'rubypants', '~> 0.2.0'
  gem 'rb-fsevent', '~> 0.9'
  gem 'stringex', '~> 1.4.0'
  gem 'liquid', '~> 2.3.0'
  gem 'thin'
end

gem 'sinatra', '~> 1.3.2'

The next time you run rake preview your blog on http://localhost:4000 should run smooth as silk on the Thin server.

Enjoy your sweet, speedy, dev environment!