I recently set up this website using Github Pages and Jekyll and since this was a totally new experience for me, I thought it would be interesting to write about my experiences, and the things I still have to learn. Until recently my digital footprint has been very small by design, but I’ve realized that I want to build my skills by getting more involved in new technologies and projects of my own and share that with others.

Getting Started

Trying out Jekyll

A coworker recommended Jekyll to me so the first thing I did was go to the Jekyll site and read the documentation. Jekyll is a Ruby gem that is used for static website generating and it seemed to be a good fit for what I was looking for. I decided it would be worth giving it a try so I walked through the Step by Step Tutorial on the website. I got the site up and running locally, but I didn’t want to have to run it locally on my machine to access the website so that’s where I turned to Github Pages.

Github Pages

Github Pages is great because it allows you to deploy a static website right from your repository. I can’t emphasize how easy it is. I walked through the documentation and I was able to get my site hosted within an hour, and I didn’t have to worry about running a local jekyll server. The documentation is pretty good, but I will say there are some minor gaps that required a bit of Googling and trial and error. For instance, the command to create a new jekyll site in step 7 jekyll new --skip-bundle . failed for me because it did not like the --skip-bundle flag. I was able to get the jekyll installed by simply doing jekyll new . but it didn’t create a Gemfile, so I had to make one myself. While I was troubleshooting some minor issues that came up during the setup, I found this Github issue really useful, as it addresses some things I had to work through to get Jekyll setup with Github Pages. Once I got through the documentation I had a working website that fully deployed from my main branch, the only problem was it looked like a high school web design project gone horribly wrong.

I’m not a web developer or a designer and while I’m not opposed to learning more about it, spending copious amounts of time writing css stylesheets and html didn’t feel like a good use of my time. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when there are lots of options for importing a theme for your Jekyll site. I didn’t play around with this but I did see that Github Pages allows you to add themes so that could be something to try. The Jekyll documentation has a list of websites that allow you to browse different themes people have created, some of which are free and open source so I opted for that.

Jekyll Themes

I went to the Jeykll Themes site which allows you to filter by free themes, and I perused through them until I found one called Beautiful Jekyll, which seemed to fit what I was looking for.

From there I looked through the Github repository for Beautiful Jekyll, and I was impressed by how thorough the README file and comments were. I decided to fork the repository and try it out. At this point I had already installed and setup Jekyll two times now so it didn’t take me long to get it working. I was so surprised how quickly and easily I was able to start personalizing the site.

Final Thoughts

It can be a bit challenging making changes to the code for the site since I don’t have a ton of web experience. Nonetheless, it’s certainly helping me improve my web skills, and I get a good laugh at reading the funny comments that are in the source code from the forked repo. Many thanks to Dean Attali who is an amazing open source developer and the creator of the Beautiful Jekyll theme. If you use his Jekyll theme or any of his other open source projects, definitely send him some money on Github or Patreon to support his work.