I'm new to Octopress. I created a custom about-me like page as the home page (source/index.md) and moved the default source/index.html to /source/blog/index.html.
In my Rakefile, I changed blog_index_dir from source to source/blog.
In source/blog/index.html I changed the reference to /archives to /blog/archives.
In source/_includes/custom/navigation.html I changed the links to Blog and Archives to /blog and /blog/archives.
I haven't deployed my site yet because I'm still working on it, but when I view it using rake watch and Pow, my posts show up in the sidebar under Recent Posts, but no posts show up in the Blog page.
The source code for my site is at https://github.com/benlindsay/blog
I forgot to change the line in _config.yml from
paginate_path: "posts/:num"
to
paginate_path: "blog/posts/:num". That fixed the problem.