TL;DR

In this series of posts, I will document how I created a blog on GitHub Pages.

In this post, I’ll describe my first problem in creating a blog with Jekyll and how I solved it.

Why leave WordPress?

If you’re fed up with WordPress sites (like me), want free hosting for a blog, quite nice domain name for free and have a DIY blog for yourself, you might want to try out GitHub Pages (gives you free hosting) and Jekyll (a static content site generator). As long as it is all in static pages you can make a quite nice site. It struck me like a lightning: do we really need a database for blogging?

So…

Making a blog with Jekyll

I created a repository on Github.

At first, I tried to make the blog with Theme Chooser. I chose the minimal theme and saved the default file. Sure, it looks good. Then I saw the file structure:

_config.yml
index.md

That’s it.

Someday, I will probably create a Jekyll page from scratch, but to be honest, I’d like to jump start into blogging. So I started from the beginning. Using quickstart guide I created a basic template.

jekyll new myblog

Just like that. But after I committed it I saw that none of the CSS is being rendered. Few days of googling (srsly) I found the solution. I modified the baseurl property in the config.yml file:

    baseurl: "/devblog" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog

Where devblog was my repo name.

Now, it’s time to do some migrations :-)