130 Widgets

Semi-random thoughts and tales of tinkering

Hello world again

In spare moments I’ve been looking for a quick blogging solution, and now I have one.

GitHub Pages is a wonderful free resource for all users of GitHub, both free and paid. Plus, it’s extremely easy to get started with it. You can start from scratch, or fork a repo to get a headstart.

  1. Get a GitHub account, if you don’t already have one.
  2. Fork Barry Clark’s jekyll-now repo.
  3. Rename your fork’s repository to <yourgithubname>.github.io.
  4. Done!

What you end up with is a static site. This basically means there is no database needed to run things. GitHub provides Jekyll (the code that generates the static pages) as a service. All of my content are Markdown text files, which are versioned with Git.

If you are interested in the same, please check out Barry Clark’s extremely helpful repo and explanations:

What’s next?

  • Private repo: I don’t believe you can take a forked repo private, so may do a tiny amount of work to make this blog’s repo private. (Note, I believe GitHub Pages is only supported in private repos wih paid GitHub accounts.) I may prefer the repo to remain public.
  • Style: I’d like to style things a little. I’ve already added an excerpt separator to the site’s _config.yml, but I haven’t bothered to look at themes.
  • Custom domain: I am using a custom domain for this site. Getting this to work was mostly simple, but I had more hiccups than I expected.
  • Run Jekyll locally: I need to run the site locally.
  • Drafts: I need a drafts strategy, which is probably this.

What’s long-term?