How To Host A Blog On Github

A blog lets a person express his/her thoughts, and everyone craves to have his/her blog. Creating a blog is quite simple as of today. Open-source software such as wordpress, jekyll, hugo can help you create & set up your blog. In this post, we will see about Jekyll and how to host it in Github for free.

Create a brand new Jekyll blog

Install Jekyll using the instructions provided here. You mainly need ruby, ruby gems, gcc, make as pre-requisite. Run the below commands to get a new blog up and running.

                                    gem install jekyll bundler                                      jekyll new my-new-blog                                      cd                              my-new-blog                                      bundle                            exec                              jekyll serve                              

That's it. You can navigate to http://localhost:8080 and see your blog up and running like this

Customizing the blog

As you see, the blog is a bare minimum, and the default values mentioned in the config file (_config.yml) are used. You can use the _config.yml file to add new plugins, provide metadata about the blog, add your social media profiles, modify themes, etc.

Plugins

Some well-known plugins, to name a few are,

• jekyll-sitemap - Plugin that generates sitemap for the blog
• jekyll-admin - Plugin that provides an admin console to write the post
• jekyll-seo-tag - Plugin that adds metadata tags for search engines and social networks to better index and displays your site's content.

You can know about other useful plugins here.

Themes

Minima is the default theme for Jekyll. There are many other themes that you can use too. It is possible to customize the minima theme by adding your CSS and Html. Adding support for comments using Disqus is in-built. Also, there is a provision to enable Google Analytics.

Liquid templating

It need not be that all the contents in the blog have to be static. You can add dynamic content using Liquid templating. Jekyll provides tag and filter options on top of liquid.

Using the custom domain name for the blog

You can specify your custom domain by adding a file CNAME in the git repo, as mentioned here.

Hosting & deploying the blog with Github pages

Using your GitHub account, create a new repository. Push the contents of the jekyll blog created above to the new repository. Go to the github project settings page, generally available in the url https://github.com/<github-id>/my-new-blog/settings. In the settings page, under the Github pages section, specify the branch to use for the github source. This can be the main branch or some other branch in the repository.

As soon as the github page is enabled on a branch, github automatically creates actions to build the jeyll blog on a new commit to the branch.

Advantages of using Jekyll & Github pages

• Open-source
• Free hosting by Github, though there is some restriction as mentioned here. But the restriction would be more than enough for personal websites and for getting started with a blog
• You don't need to be a HTML or CSS expert to get started. The blog posts are written in markdown. One can even use an online markdown editor such as Dillinger.
• It is faster as there is no database and the content is mostly static
• You can use your domain name or use the free github.io subdomain
• Free SSL support
• Version control for your blog, out of the box since the blog is on Github. Easy collaboration(new blog posts or site changes) using github pull requests.
• You can use Github actions and even update your site content dynamically. The Jekyll blog need not be dynamic after all. For example, you can run a python script in a github action as a cron and update the pages in your blog daily/hourly
• Plugin ecosystem is awesome. You can add plugins, or you can even write your plugins and get additional functionalities to your blog.

When not to use Jekyll

• If you are not familiar with git or a person who is not a developer, setting up and customizing jekyll may be a bit tough for you. You can look at WordPress or blogger, where all the things are getting done using UI.
• You don't know much about blogging, and looking for a ready-made solution, jekyll may not be the right fit.

Let's get started with blogging using Jekyll & Github pages. Happy blogging!!

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How To Host A Blog On Github

Source: https://www.loginradius.com/blog/async/setup-blog-in-minutes-with-jekyll/#:~:text=Hosting%20%26%20deploying%20the%20blog%20with%20Github%20pages&text=Go%20to%20the%20github%20project,use%20for%20the%20github%20source.

Posted by: boydollourety.blogspot.com

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