When writing a post, you can add an HTML comment `<!--more-->` to split the post for an excerpt. Only the first section of the post, before the comment,
Octopress offers a CSS only technique for pull quotes, based on the technique by [Maykel Loomans](http://miekd.com/articles/pull-quotes-with-html5-and-css/).
When writing longform posts, I find it helpful to include pull quotes to help readers easily identify the topics covered in each section. Some prefer to break things up with lots of headings, and while this seems to be a trend it doesn't work so well for long form prose.
It is important to note that {" pull quotes are merely visual in presentation and should not appear twice in the text. "} That is why it a CSS only technique for styling pull quotes is preferable. Octopress includes a handy pull quote plugin to make this easy for you.
Puts is a Liquid block which outputs its contents to your terminal with Ruby's `puts` command. This really handy when you're working on a Liquid tag or a Jekyll plugin and you want to to be able to peek behind the curtain at what Liquid sees.