Setting up a static website/blog with jekyll

A couple of people asked me for more info on my new blog setup here’s a rough outline of what’s involved in setup and posting. There are many ways of doing this, this is just the way that suited me best for now.

What you need to follow along:

A domain from GoDaddy
An account on GitHub

Things I like about this setup

Built-in backups,
offline editing,
no shonkey web gui,
no charge for hosting with custom domain and https,
simple dev friendly templating,
a nice simple code-friendly mobile-friendly design,
full control.
public revision history of blog posts with no extra effort (no more “updated: blah” in blog posts)

Why jeykll fits that

A blog post like this one is just a text file in a special format called markdown. These can then be trivially source-controlled with git, which serves as version control and distributed backup in one neat package. I use git for work so although it’s not the easiest tool to use that’s not a problem for me. Theoretically if you don’t know git you could probably just do all your editing in the github web interface these days.

Here’s the entire folder structure of this blog as it stands right now. You can see there’s really not a lot too it.

tim@fox:~/repo/timwise.co.uk(master)
$ tree
.
├── 404.md
├── about.md
├── categories.md
├── CNAME
├── _config.yml
├── _drafts
│   └── 2019-06-24-setting-up-a-jekyll-blog.md
├── favicon.ico
├── fonts
│   ├── aramisi.ttf
│   ├── EBGaramond-Regular.ttf
│   └── FuturaPTLight.otf
├── images
│   ├── 404.jpg
│   ├── reverie-demo.png
│   ├── reverie.png
│   └── reverie-text.png
├── _includes
│   ├── analytics.html
│   ├── disqus.html
│   ├── meta.html
│   └── svg-icons.html
├── index.html
├── _layouts
│   ├── default.html
│   ├── page.html
│   └── post.html
├── LICENSE
├── _posts
│   └── 2019-06-21-yet-another-new-blog.md
├── _sass
│   ├── _darcula.scss
│   ├── _highlights.scss
│   ├── _reset.scss
│   ├── _svg-icons.scss
│   └── _variables.scss
└── style.scss

7 directories, 30 files

The posts are just text files using the markdown format with a .md file extension instead of .txt and a short header for information like page title and tags. Here’s the top of this one:

---
layout: post
title: Setting up a static website/blog with jekyll
categories: [howto,backstage]
---

A couple of people asked me for more info on my new blog setup here's a rough
outline of what's involved in setup and posting. There are *many* ways of doing
this, this is just the way that suited me best for now.

How I set it up

I actually am reconfiguring from another setup, and used some advanced sillyness, but I’ll simplify that here down to roughly the steps you’d need to go from cold as I’m sure that’s more interesting to you.

Buy a domain from GoDaddy
Create a GitHub account
Find a jekyll themeon become a base for your new site (the themes vary on how ready they are for you to just crack on). Here’s the reverie theme that I used with minimal customisation.
Go into the settings for your repo,
turn on github pages,
configure your domain name,
enable https
Go to GoDaddy and set up the DNS to point to the github servers

Blogging with Jekyll

Create new text file in the _posts folder, name ityyyy-mm-dd-your-post-title.md,
steal the header block from above and customise it for your post,
write stuff
use markdown for layout,
add images by saving them to an images folder and also adding them to your git repo, use ![alt text](/images/something.png) to show the image in your .md file,
check everything in & git push to github,
your changes are live within seconds of pushing.

If you aren’t up to the full git setup, you can edit your blog directly in github’s web interface.

Creating a new post
Editing a post
Editing the text of a post

Summary

Wordpress was overcomplicated for my needs, and slower to use/read, this new setup should mean I can tap away on the train and send new thoughts your way more regularly.

Bonus points for MailChimp’s rss to email which means it’ll automatically hit your inbox.