I’ve been putting this off for some time now, but I’ve finally bit the bullet and got a blog up and running :-) Over the last year I’ve been working on a number of development projects in both my professional and personal life that I’d like to share with the community.
Having previously tried various blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger, I decided that what I really need is something very simple so that I can focus on content. After hearing a lot of buzz recently about static site generators, I got inspired to try Jekyll and GitHub Pages.
The nice thing about this setup is that hosting on Github is free, providing that the codebase for the blog repository is public.
I began by forking a nice looking example called Beautiful Jekyll by Dean Atalli. It’s a really good starting point as it’s easily configurable and includes some basic layouts and sample posts. When hosting with GitHub pages, it’s as simple as adding a new page to the repository and the site will automatically rebuild.
Another nice thing I discovered is that there is a free to use service called Prose which hooks into the GitHub repository and provides a CMS-style editor for writing your posts. It has a very clean and easy to use interface which allows previewing and saving posts as drafts.
I’m reasonbly new to using Git with the command line. I’d previously been using Mercurial with BitBucket and TortoiseHG. I found an excellent online tutorial on try.github.io which is around 15 minutes long and takes you through all the basics. I’d highly recommend this if you’re new to Git.
My aim is to get into a regular practice of blogging about stuff I’m working on and sharing anything useful I come across. Thanks for visiting, there’ll be more posts to follow!