Blog

Setting up your own blog

Get a free, beautiful, open-source blog up and running in an hour
Jul 19, 2015

Do you like this blog? Do you want to start your own?

I have always wanted to start a blog, and was looking for something with the following attributes:

  • Free: I didn’t want to be paying for a blog, so Posthaven was out.
  • Open: I wanted complete control, so Medium and Svbtle were out.
  • Easy: I didn’t want to spend too much time pixel pushing

For the longest time I assumed if I had fine-grain control it would mean self hosting(not free) and fiddling with pixels(takes time). A couple weeks ago I came across the combination of GitHub Pages and Jekyll which would allow me to run a fully customizable static site for free off of GitHub! Is there any blogging platform that puts your posts under a version control system as beautiful as git?

In the spirit of sharing and to save everyone a bunch of time, I’ve tried to document what I’ve done to get this site up and running on OSX.

Part 1: GitHub

GitHub is a service for hosting code repositories. You can host public repos here for free. We will be using a GitHub feature to host our new blog.

  1. Create a “user or organization site” by following the instructions here.
  2. DO NOT set up a “project site”.
  3. You can stop after you complete the step “Clone the repository”.

Part 2: Jekyll

Jekyll takes Markdown, HTML/CSS and some simple Ruby based templating to generate blog sites. Don’t worry if you don’t know Jekyll or Markdown or Ruby.

  1. If you don’t have ruby, you can get it here.
  2. If you don’t have the gem package manager you can get it here.
  3. Install Jekyll by running gem install --user-install bundler jekyll insructions.

Part 3: WEB 2.0

I found the default Jekyll template a bit bland so I went and found a theme that I liked as a starting point.

  1. Pick a theme. I choose Pixyll because it was clean and mobile optimized. Pixell on mobile
  2. Download it straight into your empty GitHub repo from Part 1.3.
  3. If you want to view a local hosted version navigate to your repo run jekyll serve and then go to http://127.0.0.1:4000/ in a browser

Part 4: Customize

Here is a list of the things that I did to get my site up and running:

  • go to the _config.yml file and drop your own information in
  • customize footer.html and header.html in the _includes/ folder
  • move everything in _posts/ to _drafts/ (study the template demos later)
  • create a new post in _posts/ with the standard naming convention (YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post)