Create a blog for free with Jekyll and Github Pages
Have you ever thought about starting a blog that transforms your ideas into something helpful for everyone, but put the idea away because of the amount of work it takes for hosting your page and all the tedious backend solutions?
Don’t be afraid! With the Ruby Framework Jekyll for site generation and free hosting possibilities like Github Pages there is no need for a backend or a complex knowledge in web development.
I share with you some interesting starting points, that should lead you to a quick, easy and free start with your blog post or personal page.
Getting started with Jekyll
Jekyll is a static site generator that uses Ruby scripts with Ruby 2.5.0 or higher. You can even start a server that hosts your page.
The main element of a Jekyll project is the __config.yml file for customizing variables, templates and other building related settings.
The other core concepts are the HTML and Markdown files inside the specific folders. As default Jekyll creates blog posts when you store Markdown files with the syntax yyyy-mm-ddd-title.md in the folder _posts. This makes it easy to have a quick start with less boilerplate code.
Please refer to the Quickstart guide.
Themes
Having a quick with Jekyll is fine, but creating a blog site still costs a lot of time. The content structure needs optimization and should look good on every device.
Here comes one very strong feature of Jekyll and that is theming. In the _config.yml you can reference a theme from a provider of your choice, so you have a strong foundation for your new blog. On Jekyll Theme you can find a theme for every style or topic that you can think of. Most creators also have some additional information on specific configurations.
Github hosting
The good thing about hosting with Github Pages is that it uses Jekyll as a default site generator engine. You just need to add a pages-deploy.yml file with some basic configurations under the .github/workflows folder inside the root of your project. A complete tutorial from the official Github Site can be found under Setting up a Github Pages Site with Jekyll.
When you name your repository <username>.github.io and set the visibility to public, than the hosting even is for free.
Special Thanks
Thanks to @TechnoTim for the helpful tutorial on getting started with Jekyll themes and to Cotes for the Chirpy Theme that powers this blog.