I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for a while, but have just been put off by the big systems because they just feel a little too large, and I don’t want to be reliant on some CMS company having their websites running. I always thought static generation is a good idea, and when I heard about Jekyll I thought it sounded perfect for what I wanted, which was to be able to store my posts in a Git repo as simple markdown and HTML.

However, I’m on Windows, and don’t want to set up Ruby etc just to have a blog, so this is an experiment in running a Jekyll site on Github without actually running Jekyll locally. This may well turn out to be a bad idea, but I’m giving it a try anyway. For those not in the know, when you upload to a special Git repo in GitHub, it gets treated as a Jekyll site. Github will run the transformation from templates and markdown into a bunch of static HTML and publish it at quite a nice URL automatically.

Step one: create a repo called <your github username>.github.io. Here is my one: https://github.com/danielflower/danielflower.github.io

Step two was getting bootstrapped. I decided to just grab a simple design from jekyllthemes.org and went with richbray.me/frap/ in the end. I just downloaded the theme and stuck it in the Git repo I just cloned. I pushed and cloned, then waited for a few minutes, and then I had a blog at http://danielflower.github.io/. Cool!

Then I just made a few changes, pushed again, and this blog exists. Tools used: notepad++ and Git.

Update 1

If this was my zeroith post, then I just posted my first actual post which included images and code. I was hoping images could live in a sub-directory next to the article, however because jekyll changes the directory during processing this isn’t possible. So I had to put images in an /images/ folder in the project root, and have image references such as /images/mvn-site/mojo-options.png.

Update 2

It’s possible to enable syntax highlighting of code by using 4 backticks and specifying the language name.