The New York theme makes use of a fantastic photo of the New York skyline to act as the background for your blog. It is a common design technique to use a photo to fill up the entire web page. Take a look at about.me or this showcase of full page background designs. We are going to show you how to use an image or photo for your Octopress blog’s background.

We assume you already have a photo. If not, there are inexpensive stock photos, or you can find images from flickr. Sometimes there are some rare finds on flickr. Do remember to use only creative commons licensed images.

Using the New York theme as the base

The New York theme already has CSS styles to use a background image. We are going to work from the code base. Install the New York theme. Once you have installed, take a look at the source/images directory. You should see an image called base.jpg. Take a look at that. It should be the New York skyline image.

All you need to do is to replace base.jpg with your own.

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rake generate

Run the generate commands to see the end result. Once you are happy with your background image, deploy it.

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rake deploy