New Blog – GitHub Pages and Jekyll

New Blog!

I’ve decided to make more effort sharing what I learn, so I’ve created a new blog: https://adamrushuk.github.io

Why?

Over the past year or so I’ve increasingly found myself on GitHub. Mainly looking at code, but also content served up on GitHub Pages; typically sites ending github.io.

I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging, so thought I’d give GitHub Pages a go and see how it compares to using WordPress.

A few clicks later and I arrived on the GitHub Help pages, and noticed Jekyll mentioned: https://help.github.com/categories/customizing-github-pages/

I’d never even heard of Jekyll before, so time for some Google-Fu!

What?

Looks like Jekyll generates static content, and also integrates directly with GitHub:

How?

So now I’ve got a vague idea of what Jekyll is, I need to choose a theme and do some testing on GitHub. The Minimal Mistakes theme looks popular and is still being actively developed: https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/pulse

There’s even a great install guide that looks easy enough to follow: https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/docs/quick-start-guide/

Let’s give this a go then!

Here’s the steps I took:

  1. Forked the Minimal Mistakes theme, then renamed the repo to adamrushuk.github.io
  2. Confirmed the default theme was showing as expected: https://adamrushuk.github.io

  3. Cloned my new repo: git clone [email protected]:adamrushuk/adamrushuk.github.io.git
  4. Added the original repo as an upstream remote: git remote add upstream https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes.git
  5. Removed the following folders and files:
    .editorconfig
    .gitattributes
    .github
    /docs
    /test
    CHANGELOG.md
    minimal-mistakes-jekyll.gemspec
    README.md
    screenshot-layouts.png
    screenshot.png
  6. Updated information in _config.yml.
  7. Committed all changes with an “Initial commit” message: git commit -am “Initial commit after fork”
  8. Pushed the changes to GitHub: git push
  9. After about 1 minute the changes were reflected online:

  10. Went through the awesome step-by-step guide that details the many configuration options available: https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/docs/configuration/