Moving my site to Jekyll - The Journey

personal, blog, cms 3 mins read

Few years ago, I wanted to build a profile page to have some presence on the internet, so I went and built a one page site using MVC .Net. Nothing special about the site, a static HTML page, but the idea was I would add more to the site in the future and that didn’t happen. Busy with work and life the site was not a priority for me.

Fast forward a year or two, I found about Jekyll while reading some programming articles and I said to myself I should use it to build my blog, it looks really cool. As with most of the ideas that comes to my mind I did nothing.

Fast forward again to this fall, the idea of building a blog came back and I remembered Jekyll. As I am looking into the many options to build a blog, I found github pages which use Jekyll. For me that was a sign that it is time to give Jekyll a try.

What is Jekyll?

From the Jekyll site, Jekyll transform your plain text into static websites and blogs. manage your site. You write your blog post, add the file to your site, deploy it and puff, the post will show on your site. Jekyll gives you full control on how to style your site. Once you build the main structure of your blog, all the posts after that will look great.

How do you start?

Head to the Jekyll website, it has a lot of resources. You can also check Jekyll tips website. They have video tutorials and templates that will help you start understand Jekyll quickly and start your journey in building a kick ass site. Btw, I am not trying to advertise Jekyll, I just fell in .

First install Jekyll using the following commands:

* gem install jekyll bundler
* ~ $ jekyll new my-awesome-site
* ~ $ cd my-awesome-site
* ~/my-awesome-site $ bundle exec jekyll serve
* Now browse to http://localhost:4000

Then download a Jekyll template, there are a lot on the web. You can download this website template from Github. Once that is set, you can start reading the template and modifying it while watching the videos on the Jekyll tips website.

I found that the documentation is really easy to understand and in few hours you can have a site ready for deployment. I used github to deploy my site. It is very easy. The difficult part was really working on the appearance of the site. You get free hosting with github pages and maintaining the site is easier than you think. Any commits you push to your repository, will be immediately published to your site. Deployment is so simple and seamless.

I used the dbyll template to get familiar with the format and layout and used some of the code as the basis of this template. Also, I got inspired by Prologue theme from Html5 Up.

If you would like to start and having trouble, feel free to contact me by emailing me or leaving a comment.