Setting Up A New Blog Using Github Pages
10 Mar 2014A new blog
A long time ago I started out with a self-hosted Wordpress blog. It took some time to setup, but in the end I got it working on my server at home and was available together with some other sites through Apache.
It took a lot of time to correctly set up Wordpress having all the features I would want: some kind of post drafting and publication, a simple and easy web site, a good uptime. Unfortunately the blog died a cold dead a while ago. When setting up a new blog I wanted more or less the same functionality and was about to setup a new self-hosted Wordpress blog when I first looked into alternatives.
My eye fell upon GitHub pages, which is a free hosted service from GitHub on which you can serve simple static web pages. As long as your pages are thus statically created it is a great place to host them with good availability. Luckily they also provide a way to generate the pages using Jekyll, which is a blog-aware static page generator. The blog itself is just a GitHub repository and the blog posts are files written in markdown.
Getting started
The process to get it up and running was easy:
-
First create a repository on GitHub with you GitHub user: user.github.io (.com might also work).
-
Check out your Jeckyll template of choice (I chose Jekyll Bootstrap)
$ git clone https://github.com/plusjade/jekyll-bootstrap/ -
Attach it to your newly created repo
$ git remote set-url origin git@github.com:user/user.github.io -
And push
$ git push
Your new blog is up and running in about 10 minutes.
Optionally you can also let your own domain refer to it very easily:
-
Add a file
CNAMEto the root of your repository with the exact URL in the body of the file such as:blog.timmybankers.nl -
Configure the DNS of your domain to let the same URL point to user.github.io using as you might have guessed
CNAME.
##Useful links
More useful links are:
- https://prose.io/: A simple web interface that you can use to edit your markdown blog posts in the browser.
- themes: You can easily change the visual appearance of your blog by changing themes.