Starting with Jekyll

It’s cool to have a personal website. As a novice, where to start? The cheapest, practical and programmatic option is Github Pages

Cheapest - Free to use GH Pages. You may not get a dedicated domain, but you’ll get a name.github.io

Practical - You can go for blogger or wordPress for writing a blog post. However, you’ll never get to experience the nitty-gritty involved with running an actual website.

Programmatic - Once you started programming, it will be intriguing to learn something new.

How does having GHP can make a difference? It’s not straight forward to maintain GHP, you should put in some honest efforts to build the site from nothing. The necessary skills to have are,

• Git - Proficiency in Git is a basics for a programmer. By using GitHub to host your site, you get more exposure on a long run.
• Markdown - We all know how human-unfriendly html can be. This is a simple markup language, acts as an alternative for HTML. You can do a lot over a Markdown.
• HTML & CSS - The markdown comes as an alternative to some extent, yet HTML & CSS are unavoidable for a website. You need to tinker with these to get your frontend right.

Finally, the Jekyll. It’s a static site generator, written on Ruby. And, it doesn’t matter what the previous sentence means. Just remember, its a simple tool that’s going to help you with site generation. Just follow below steps in the order.

• Install Jekyll - This bugger is written on Ruby. Ruby runs on all OS - Linux, Windows or Mac. So, whatever your choice is Ruby is there. On top of Ruby, install Jekyll.
• Initialize the site - Just refer the official docs to build your site. You can view your site on http://localhost:4000.
• Tinkering - Now start tinkering with your UI. You can try out wide variety of themes. The community is so benevolent to offer many themes for free. Also, so there are themes that comes for a price, if you afford.
• Deployment - Once everything looks good, you can push the changes to Github. One thing to keep in mind is to have the Git repo as username.github.io

The GitHub supports Jekyll site natively. Meaning, the test-site that worked on Jekyll results in a site, when a pushed to Github.