I recently had the misfortune that octopress started ignoring my published: false statement in my blogs YAML header section. I have now solved the issue.

The published: false statement is meant to prevent the blog from being prematurely published, eg while it is in progress.

The internet told me that running rake generate before rake deploy was supposed to remove blogs marked as published: false from the files to be published. However it was not working for me.

Octopress does allow blogs marked as published: false to be used in the preview task, so you can see your work in progress locally.

Looking through the Rakefile I discovered that a file called .preview-mode is used to handle this exemption.

It turned out that I had accidentally committed the .preview-mode file to git while running the preview. It was now always there! This messed up the deploy and enabled all my in flight blogs to be published.

The fix was simple.

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git rm -f ./.preview-mode
git commit -m "removed .preview-mode, which was accidentally added"

SOLVED. rake generate and rake deploy now work properly again.

:-)