Setting up this blog

30 Nov 2016

How I did become aware of GitHub pages

2 weeks ago I heard about the GitHub project GitHub Pages. This project hosts a static website bound to your GitHub account build and served by Jekyll.

My colleague bktid posted about his adventure and how he did his setup.

Steps I took to create this blog

After talking with sch3lp I figured out that setting up my own blog shouldn’t be that hard. However since I had zero knowledge about Jekyll, I used tinypress.co to have a functional blog in a few seconds. Tinypress.co provides a web-interfaces which integrates with your GitHub-repo. It also offers a CRUD to manage your own posts on your GitHub page.

I only used tinypress.co for the initialisation of this blog. Since I like to have more insights on how Jekyll works, I removed the integration from tinypress.co. Now I’m adding posts on my local machine and pushing it to my git-repo first instead of using the editor provided by tinypress.co.

Bktid mentioned some experimental setup, which included installing chocolatey and ruby on windows. I did give it a try and I succeeded! Seems it wasn’t the technical mumbojumbo like I thought it would be.

Issue(s) I’ve encountered

Posts not showing on my home page (locally)

While writing this first post I noticed that my post wasn’t shown on my index.html (which contains an overview of posts) hosted locally but it was shown on the webpage hosted on my GitHub page.

After google-ing I found out that the paginator plugin is no longer standard in Jekyll 3.x like it was in Jekyll 2.x.

To fix this you have 2 options:

• Replace paginator with site in the following piece of code in your index.html

   for post in paginator.posts
  

• Add the following line to your _config.yml

  gems: [jekyll-paginate]
  

  And install the gem with ruby

  gem install jekyll-paginate
  

Since I want to work with pagination I modified my _config.yml and installed the gem.

Kudos to GitHub Pages and Jekyll