Blogging on GitHub

Jan 2013

GitHub Pages is a great example of it just works. Internally it uses a parsing engine called Jekyll, which creates static pages from your dynamic components.

Why Jekyll with GitHub Pages ?

  • Minimalistic - It comes with no content, you create the components (very clean).

  • Convention over configuration - It expects a certain structure for your website, reducing the configuration files (and exceptions due to mis-configuration).

  • Markdown - don’t need any fancy editors to write posts.

  • Test your blog on Windows locally.

  • No fuss deployment - Just use git to push out your changes.

  • Setting up a custom domain is as easy as spelling CNAME.

To get started you need a GitHub account, if your account name is username just create a repository called username.github.com and push your content to the master branch.

Since the content is static (GitHub does not support Jekyll plugins) implementing tags and search can get tricky, luckily this too has been solved.