Start with Jekyll and Github

I’m a web developer and I follow people, stay update with open source projects
I love <3, I try to fix bugs and sometimes I create them too (oh who doesn’t?).

I had some blogs. No really. I had more than one, more than once.
Most of them were in my my mind.
You know, You think writing for a blog is easy and, despite everything I’m a developer:
I technically know how to code a blog so I would be cool also to write posts in!

Yes, I said I had them in my mind because I had never found the right platform for my needs. Fast publishing, great html output, fully customizable, mobile ready…

My favorite was Posterous, but Twitter acquired and put them down.

All the alternatives to my old blog were flowing in my mind and after a long time I finally found a good solution. This could be a good solution also for you if:

• you love markdown and git
• you want great control of everything
• you don’t want to bother with hosting

so get my advice, use Jekyll + GitHub Pages

let’s do this

The outstanding guide about Pages you find will cover most of common issues, however I’d like to talk you about the some details.

You need first to have a personal repository <username>.github.io.
If you have a public domain name, then create a file CNAME and push it in the root of your github project.

jekyll

Then move forward to jekyll. The just created repository supports some special files: whenever you push some special markdown automatically they are translated to .html and are available as a static website. Cool right?

In order to preview your blog locally you need to install jekyll in your machine. It’s python based so make sure you have:

$ python --version
Python 2.7.5

Install Jekyll it:

gem install jekyll ;
cd <username>.github.com ;
jekyll new myblog ;

And you’re ready to run it locally with jekyll serve -w

$ jekyll serve -w
Configuration file: username.github.io/_config.yml
            Source: username.github.io
       Destination: username.github.io/_site
      Generating... done.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled
    Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

now open http://localhost:4000/.

Next step is to create markdown files within the _posts folder.
Remember you can still create plain .html files.
Nothing more to say, follow the official guide.

themes

Generally Jekyll supports themes too, just google around.

github

You have nothing to do with github, just push the jekyll files to your personal
repository. Remember that if you want to use jekyll with github projects, use branch gh-pages. You have to enable it per project.

So this is my first official post with Jekyll@Github, this configuration gives me so much flexibility. That freedom I need while experimenting.