Forking Octopress
When I setup Octopress I followed the directions outline on the Octopress Setup page. In a nutshell these steps create a Github repository for you to track your instance of Octopress with, and a local (i.e., on your computer) instance of Octopress where you create your website, generate it, and from where you deploy. Diagrammatically it looks something like this: 
From your local instance you can fetch updates from Octopress and keep your Github instance synchronized via git push origin master.
My Git-fu is not very strong yet, so I was at first mystified and then frustrated to discover that I couldn’t easily share a plugin I added to my Octopress installation with Brandon Mathis’ ur-Octopress. On Github, at least, without a fork tying your repository back to a source repository, there is no way to issue a pull request. It maybe that one can create the equivalent of a pull request on their local copy of a repository and send a pull request to the project owner, but my Git understanding doesn’t include that knowledge.
What I wanted and needed was an active fork of the ur-Octopress, a fork that was actively tied to my local instance of Octopress as well. After asking one of the developers I work with who has more Git experience than I, and after posting a question on StackOverflow, I took the following steps to “add” a fork to my Github Octopress repository.
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I deleted my existing Github Octopress repository. It was named “Octopress” so any new fork of the ur-Octopress would result in the fork being called Octopress-1. Not what I wanted.
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I forked the imathis/octopress repository.
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I removed the, now broken, remote between my local git repository and the deleted Github repository using git remote rm origin
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I created a new remote, called origin, to link my local git repository to the forked Octopress on Github, via git remote add origin git://github/zan5hin/octopress.git
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When I tried to push my local git repository to Github (git push origin master) it failed with the following error message: ! [rejected] master -> master (non-fast-forward). The fork on Github contained changed not present in my local repository that I needed to resolve first. If I have updated locally before starting this process it is likely I wouldn’t have had this error. To resolve the error I ran git pull origin master.
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I resolved the two minor merge conflicts created by the git pull.
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I generated my site and viewed it via Pow to make sure everything was still working properly.
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I synchronized my local repository with Github via git push origin master
The result of all this work is looks like this: 
All of my commits are in place, and I can now generate pull requests for Brandon to process as he sees fit.