When I knew I wanted to blog again I had to decide where, and how, I've rolled my own, I've used Wordpress but now as I love using markdown, and GitHub has the ability to host webpages it made sense to use those.
There are a number of options:
I've used mkdocs for application documentation and I'm in the process of migrating it to docfx but for this I wanted to try something new.
I found jekyll-now(GitHub) and it's a quick setup but I wanted a few extra features.
In this post I'll run through the changes I've made.
The README.md is thorough but I'll run through it anyway.
Firstly fork the repo, rename it to your username i.e. alexhedley.github.io.
Config
Next is the configuring i.e. _config.yml
Update name, description and then find an image you wish to use, add it to the images folder and update the avatar.
avatar: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlexHedley/alexhedley.github.io/master/images/alexhedley.png
Footer Links
Next is the footer-links. Add any social media accounts you wish to show in the footer.
Next is the url, this should be amended to your github url and if it isn't the default repo update baseurl to whatever the repo is called i.e. \blog.
Favicon
To add your own favicon you can add it to the repo then update your html in default.html:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico">
Author
Most individual blogs probably wouldn't need an Author, unless you wanted guest posts but if you wish to add them it doesn't take much. I found a blog explaining how.
Create a new file _data/authors.yml and update first_last to your name i.e. alex_hedley.
# Author details.
first_last:
name: Alex Hedley
email: alex@alexhedley.com
web: http://twitter.com/alexhedley
In your post md file you can add it to the config at the top:
# Author.
author: first_last
Tags and Categories
Tags and Categories are a similar process, I found a couple of ways from a useful blog.
- http://www.minddust.com/post/alternative-tags-and-categories-on-github-pages/
- http://www.minddust.com/post/tags-and-categories-on-github-pages/
Supplementary Pages
If you wish to add extra, one off, pages this is easy to do. Just create a .md file.
In the config at the top of the page add a route:
---
layout: page
title: Apps
permalink: /apps/
---
Then add it to the main nav, in default.html.
<nav>
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/">Blog</a>
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/about">About</a>
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/apps">Apps</a>
</nav>
TODO
- icons
- paging