good news, everyone - I have a blog now

I have been thinking about setting up a blog for the longest time now, and somehow I always put it off. Either I told myself that I don’t have anything to write about, or that I don’t have the time to update regularly, or that I don’t have a vision of what I want the final product to look like… The excuses were numerous and most made logical sense. And then one day, I have discovered that you can create a blog on Github.

And the light bulb finally went on, no excuses, no hesitation.

Github + Jekyll is a great solution for creating minimal, static blogs. A static blog is beautiful in that it is easy to maintain, and the site tends to have greater stability and speed. I have followed two guides online.

1. Creating and Hosting a Personal Site on GitHub, by Jonathan McGlone

This is a fantastic guide that is great for GitHub beginners. The steps are easy to follow and all topics are covered in enough detail to ensure understanding, yet in a brief manner, so you will be off the ground in no time at all. The author promises you will be done in an afternoon, and that is absolutely true, speaking from personal experience.

2. How I Created a Beautiful and Minimal Blog Using Jekyll, Github Pages, and poole

This guide from Joshua Lande shows a slightly modified way to Jekyll blog creation, employing poole (which is basically a foundational setup for a Jekyll site). The author also shows how to create a Twitter plug. As a Twitter fan, I couldn’t resist reading through the steps.

3. Some other resources I have found helpful:

1. Markdown basics by GitHub. This was the first time I have encountered the format. It is very easy to use, and the guide gets you through the syntax very quickly.
2. Official Jekyll page is also, of course, a great source. Documentation includes a Quick-start guide and covers all the available features.