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.
- Get a GitHub account, if you don’t already have one.
- Fork Barry Clark’s jekyll-now repo.
- Rename your fork’s repository to
<yourgithubname>.github.io. - 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:
- https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/build-blog-jekyll-github-pages/
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?
- DasBlog Core: I have no interest in working on the Jekyll back-end of this solution. If I find things are limiting in any way (not likely), I’m interested in looking into a .NET-centric static site-generating solution like DasBlog Core. Scott Hanselman has a great post about his implementation.