Using Jekyll with Github Pages

In the last couple days, I fired up this personal website for myself to showcase some of the projects I have been working on as well as to get even MORE experience developing for the web. I wanted something simple and static, nothing too fancy, something I could understand inside and out just in case I ever needed to make a modification. I wanted something that I could use to create content when I needed and to get things up fast! Gone are the days writing raw HTML.

Hello, Jekyll.

Using Github Pages, I was able to get a site up and running in no time flat. Now, mind you, I’ve been making a steady sleuth of changes over the past couple days to modularize everything, but I think I’ve got the structure nearly down to a T.

My journey actually started out with no Jekyll at all, just Github Pages hosting a bunch of static files. I took one of the themes they had sitting around and hacked & slashed it to make it what I wanted. Jekyll came into the picture when I remembered that I’m a lazy developer and I wanted something else to do the dirty work for me. Considering I was using Github Pages already, well, Jekyll just fell into place.

It’s been a really great experience so far, I’ve learnt about new technologies and wonder how I ever got by without a website! It makes me feel empowered! If you don’t have yourself a personal website, I highly recommend you create one for yourself. Considering Jekyll is backed by Github, I’m relying on the fact that they won’t remove support for it someday. But if they do, I’ve luckily got every change I’ve ever made to my website backed up with git! Another great reason to go the Github route, because every publish to the site is made through a commit and push to Github.

What more reason do you need! Honestly, the hardest part of my journey through creating this website was “What icon should I use for my favicon?” I couldn’t be happier with the result. Jekyll is great.