Because this blog is made of up link posts and original content posts, I wanted to make two customizations to Octopress to keep original content from getting lost under the volume of link posts. The modifications I wanted to make were:

1. Hide all link posts from the index page.
2. Create a page just for link posts and provide navigation to it via the nav bar.

I wasn’t sure where to start because I am new to Octopress. My google-fu was questionable due to my lack of understanding Octopress’ terminology.

Hiding Link Posts from the Index Page

Out of the two things I wanted to do, this was the easiest to find help with. I found this post about hiding posts from the octopress front page almost right away.

The TLDR version of that post is: you need to assign a category to the posts you want to hide and then alter the pagination plugin to exclude that category.

Creating a Page Just for the Hidden Category and Providing a Nav Link to It

This one tripped me up for a bit. I quickly went down a black hole searching for things like “octopress create category page”.

I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for so I starting searching for other Octopress based blogs to see if anyone had done such a thing. After I came across this blog, the answer was obvious. Octopress already creates category specific pages. In order to provide a nav link to the category, I simply needed to edit the _source/custom/navigation.html file like so:

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<ul class="main-navigation">
  <!-- other nav links -->
  <li><a href="/blog/categories/links">10,000 Links</a></li>
  <!-- other nav links -->
</ul>