Big, big shout out to Arya Murali and her comprehensive guide on Medium to Creating your blog for free using Jekyll + Github pages. That’s the definitive and really spot on guide to how to do this.
I could attempt to rewrite the whole of that article in my own words and I’ve had a go but it’s so well written and clear that I’ll just direct you to that tutorial.
The GitHub Pages welcome page provides an easier method to setting up a blog on GitHub Pages but it won’t enable you to build your website locally on your machine and push the changes from there. This tutorial is a thorough guide to how to do that.
I’m running on a Ubuntu 18.04 Linux platform so in terms of installing packages and dependencies start with this at the command line.
$ sudo apt-get install ruby
$ gem install jekyll bundler
Everything else here should be straight-forward enough. It is a kind of complicated process. One of the confusing things is you build offline before creating a repository on GitHub Pages. Another issue that’s often mentioned in similar guides (I’ve read quite a lot) is checking out to the gh-pages branch. I don’t understand any of that but it’s all set out in the guide.
So I’m not exactly new to blogging or using GitHub but I do get a bit tied up in knots when trying to work my way through this stuff. Jekyll has a decent and not too long Step by Step Tutorial which I’ll have to read again. I jump into these things and only really understand what’s happening after I’ve haphazardly come across and typed in the correct instructions I needed to get it to work. That’s pretty much my amateur way in. The GitHub Pages docs were maddening. Liquid templating looks tricky. It’s all coded in Ruby this static website stuff, Jekyll and so forth. I remember that fantastic comic guide to Ruby - Why’s comic guide or something? What was that called? Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. There are static site generators for Python, such as Pelican and now I understand a bit more how it works I could have a look at that maybe or perhaps just stick with Ruby and Jekyll and a just about working website.
OK, how do I justify paragraphs? This is gonna’ be harder than I thought…