Jekyll and GitHub Pages

TLDR

Jekyll is cool. Easy. Free - it’s hosted on GitHub Pages. Uses MD. Has lots of themes. Some have support for things like Google Analytics. If only I started earlier… ;)

Why?

The idea was with me for a few years now. In fact as a student I did post some WPF things. Back then I already had that thought. Never really started.. Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about sharing my thoughts about most of the endevours I face. Maybe share the learning process. Or at least log what I’ve been playing with. Maybe not always for someone else, but mostly for myself. If anyone would actually use it for anything. Fine! Even better.

I tend to return to certain things I have to redo so I put up notes about them somewhere on my drive or along with the code.. The note apps I used are often not exactly what I need, or they jsut have some key words. Spending a few moments on writing a short article about it, may spark some new ideas and might be a worth experience. Let’s see if I can keep posting about stuff then - maybe I won’t lose the notes anymore ;) Moreover, it’s a really good way to have a summary of the things I did the previous year.

How?

Netlify

Back in 2020 I looked up some guy’s blog. He kinda did blog the way I always wanted to - and had similar interests - FPV, development, smart home, let’s call it an inspiration :D The website is built with Gatsby and hosted on Netlify. You write articles in MD. Pretty cool since I write documentation in MDs sometime anyway. As far as I remember Netlify is (or at least was back then) free even. It kinda seemed easy, but after setting up a Netlify account I lost my interest and gave up again. Maybe if I spent some time on it…

Wordpress

Second try… I bought hosting on webd.pl with Wordpress, paid for a domain for a year (which is usually cheap for the first year - it’s the next years when you really have to puy some more for it). Played with it for an hour and Wordpress/PHP was just over my head. I thought it would be easy and I would just get some template and start writing. I was wrong. I spent time making it look nice, but I had no idea what I’m doing. I had a chance to upgrade a Wordpress website before, but it was simple things and the groud work was already there, like adding SSL, GDPR popups, Google analytics and such. Since I’m a programmer, I thought fiddling with it would be enough of a challenge to keep going. Wrong again - I laid my weapons down. After a year I didn’t prolong the hosting and just deleted all the data along with it. Yikes.

Jekyll

Third time’a a charm they say. I found out GitHub offers GitHub Pages - free hosting on github.io or username.gitbhub.io in fact. So any account can have it’s own page. Awesome! And it’s free, so the exact amount of money I wanted to pay for it :D You could hook your own domain to it anyhow. It runs on Jekyll, a static page generator, written in Ruby, so something I know (although that’s mostly irrelevant, since as long as you have Ruby on your machine, it’s all you need to run it locally - you don’t really code anything for the site unless you need to write your own plugin/theme). You post in MD, the engine rewrites it to html. Nice! I set it up, didn’t bother reading the documentation and forgot about actually posting anything. Darn.

Well, until I googled for it yet again after 2 years and found this video. I looked up the Chirpy theme he spoke about. Read the docs - there’s a super simple way of cloning it with a template. And here we are. Easy to configure. Looks pretty, minimal, dark. Just what I needed. Took me half an hour to setup.

Oh, one thing - the name of the website/username.github.io MUST match your username to be properly hosted on GitHub Pages. The video was all over the place regarding it (his repo name changed throughout the video) and the guy forgot to mention it eventually.

When?

Ah right.. let’s see if I won’t forget to finally write an article this time… Glad you made it till here! I have plenty of ideas to write about :)