Jekyll runs my blog .. on github.com

This is the first post on my github.com user page, but you know that coz that is what it says in the URL bar of your browser right?

I wanted a simple way to manage the creation of a blog I want to start (I wonder how long it will last?) .. After a college once pointed me towards his page on github.com, I knew it could be done here.. but how?

With a small amount of googling I found this is referred to as “github pages” or better still: http://pages.github.com/

After a abit of reading I found out about Jekyll, which looked like an excellent way to manage and maintain a small (ish) site.

Jekyll was fun to discover and pretty simple to get your head around, so checkout my reference links below and you should be able to scrape enough information together so you can do the same.

My stepes were something like:

• Setup github.com

    * Create repo in github.com called: bugthing.github.com
  
    * Open the repo's admin page
  
    * Click the "Automatic Page Generator" button
  
    * edit, edit, edit
  
    * Click the "Continue To Layouts" button
  
    * Click "Publish" 
  

• pre-setup for Jekyll

    * Clone to repo from github.com: git clone git@github.com:bugthing/bugthing.github.com.git
  
    * Installed Jekyll: gem install jekyll
  
    * Clean up the dir so it looks like this:
  
    |-- README.md
    |-- javascripts
    |   `-- main.js
    |-- images
    |   `-- favicon.ico
    `-- stylesheets
        `-- stylesheet.css
    |-- index.html
    |-- _config.yml
    |-- _includes
    |-- _plugins
    |-- _posts
    |-- _layouts
        `-- default.html
  

• Site build

    * Edit '_layouts/default.html' and fixup HTML as you want
  
    * Edit 'stylesheets/stylesheet.css' and fixup CSS as you want
  
    * Edit '_layouts/index.html' add YAML header and HTML content
  
    * Test the site with: jekyll --server
  
    * Once happy, upload to github.com with: git push
  

• Done :)

Now, when I want to do a blog entry, I just add a YAML file to the ‘_posts’ directory and do a ‘git push’

References used:

create a github page

using jekyll

stuff about YAML

basic site based upon

markdown reference