Ask HN: Using Octopress for static website generation

I was in the process of converting my blog from WordPress to Octopress when I've noticed that the default theme is in HTML5 (not necessarily a bad thing) and it is no rendered correctly by Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

Now, I'm not an IE user myself but according to Google Analytics 60% of my readers are IE fans :(. I wonder what solution can I use to make the default theme to show correctly in IE.