minimal-blog

Jekyll is deeply integrated into GitHub. You can create a new repository, upload your Jekyll source code and GitHub will compile it and set up your site. Of course, you can fork other GitHub repositories instead of writing your own Jekyll project, which is a easy and time-saving way.
But before the site can be really accessed, your need a few settings. The following steps help you to go through the basics:

1. Create a GitHub account

For this step, nothing special to talk about. Just register a new account and login.

2. Fork a Jekyll project

You can visit my gitHub page and duplicate the Jekyll project code which this site use by clicking the fork button at the upper-right corner. Of course, you can also write your own Jekyll project and upload.

3. Rename

Now you have the Jekyll project in your repository, but GitHub will not generate your site now. You have to do some renaming. But rename what? You have two choices:

• rename the repository

You can rename the repository to username.github.io, where username is your username on GitHub. By this way, you create a so-called user page, which is accessible under the address: username.github.io.

• rename the branch

A site can be created for each project (repository) as well. In this case, you can use any repository name as you want. The thing to do is to create a branch called gh-pages and your jekyll project should be under this branch.

Now your site should be alive on GitHub. If not, give GitHub several minites.

Use minimal-blog

The minimal-blog is really a minimal blog template and very easy to use. If you host your blog on GitHub, you can just fork my repository, after a few setting steps, your blog will come into alive on GitHub.

Change the basic information of your site

Jekyll saves configuration information in the file _config.yml. So just open this file with your favoiate text editor, change the title, tagline to your blog's. Of course, you can control other behaviors by changes attributes， such as permalink, paginate.

Create your first new post

In order to write a new post, you need to create files in the folder _posts. Files in Jekyll post folder should named according to the following convention:

YYYY-MM-DD-filename.md  

Where YYYY is a fout-digit year, MM and DD are two-digit month and day respectively.
Every post file should start with the frontmatter, which tells Jekyll which layout to use, what is the title of this post, the category, the tag and so on. For the minimal-blog template, it looks like:

---
layout: post  
title: Use Minimal-blog  
category: Post
---

Add google Analytics or AdSense

Firstly, you should have a google analytics account and create a new property for your new site. Then copy your tracking code into the file:

/_includes/google-analytics.html

That's it. Really easy. For google Adsense, it is almost the same. The only difference is that your copy your google AdSense code into the file:

/_includes/google-adsense.html

Change the link list to other websites

In the sidebar, your will find a link section, where there are some links to other website. If you want to modify the list, go to file '/data/links.yml', add a item like:

- title: Jekyll Template GitHub
  url: https://github.com/runningUnicorn/minimal-blog

Where title is the name showed in the list, url is the website address you want to link to.

Have fun with Jekyll!