Creating A Jekyll Site On Github Pages

After doing some reading about setting up a blog and a portfolio I decided I wanted one for a few reasons.

  1. To remember what I’ve done.
  2. To remember how I did it.
  3. To Showcase my work.

It makes sense to me then that the first blog post should be about setting up a Jekyll site on github pages.

Domain

I obtained the domain from GoDaddy.com. Purchasing and renewing a domain is fairly cheap. Around 20 usd per year if you get protection for your domain details. I also use this domain for my emails via google workspace.

Hosting

Hosting is the expensive part. I looked into different options. Inmotion, wix, web.com etc. They all cost atleast $100 usd per year which is a hard sell considering this will mainly just be a personal blog/portfolio. That’s when I found GitHub Pages. They allow you to host a website for free and also you gain access to a lot of great GitHub functionality. I followed the instructions here to set up my site.

Changing The GitHub Pages Domain

Once my page was set up I now needed to change the domain to the one I purchased from GoDaddy.com. To do this I added a CNAME file to my repository that simply contained the domain (wildermoth.com).

I then went to the DNS manager in GoDaddy and added 4 new “A” records. The IP addresses can be found here.

alt

I also created a CNAME record

alt

Once that was set I waited a few hours and my website was officially live, free of charge, domain name and all.

Jekyll

Now I needed a simple means of generating the webiste. Making it possible to add posts quickly, similar to a wordpress. Enter Jekyll - Jekyll is a static site generator. It allows you to create a website using markdown files and templates. I followed the instructions here to get started. I also used the Minimal Mistakes theme.

Conclusion

So far Jekyll has been really easy to use. Since I can work on it directly out of my chosen IDE I’d say I prefer it to wordpress.