GitHub, Jekyll and Me!

After going through many alternatives of having a blog and trying out a few of them (WordPress, Drupal, Blogger etc), it was fine. I was planning to have it at any good hosting provider and WordPress being the choice for the content management for ease of control and flexibility.

However, I was skeptical about a few things, what if the hosting provider ditches me or asks me to pay more later on or stops inbound traffic! I was still searching for any alternative, I came across this idea of having GitHub pages! I searched for possibilities and ended up having one!

Here is a gist on why I prefer this.

• Your content is with you and a copy is at GitHub.
• You just pay for the domain (if needed).
• Its a nice way to avoid databases, dynamic pages and a whole lot of complexity by adopting Jekyll.
• Its cool to have an easy version control over the website.

Here I post some tips and references to setup a GitHub hosted website with static content and mainly programmed approach to content management.

• Get friendly with GitHub (sign up and create some repo and do some basic git commands).
• Building a site (refer this).
• Use any suitable template (search for Jekyll templates).
• Buy your desired domain (if you need to have a custom URL for your website).
• Add a CNAME file in the GitHub repo and an A-Record in DNS Records (refer this).

That’s all you need to do to get it started. However, if you are new to coding, web development, HTML and scripting it might take some time to understand GitHub, Jekyll and the way this combo works.