My tech blog built with Jekyll and published on Github pages. Uses the basically basic from this awesome guy.

Writing

Locally

• Posts go under _posts (or _drafts)
• bundle exec jekyll serve (check incremental builds, autogeneration)
• Navigate to localhost:4000/

Publishing

• Just push to the gh_pages master branch
• Navigate to https://spygi.github.io/tech-blog/ (or the CNAME)

Setting up

Resources

• The guide I followed: Github pages for Jekyll
• And vice versa: Jekyll for Github pages
• Metadata exposed from Github gem

Configuration on Github (pages) side

• Regarding repos/branches: You can use Github Pages once per user/organisation (special repository named "spygi.github.io", master branch) or per project (on master branch, master branch /docs folder or special "gh-pages" branch). This repo is using the per repo method with the master branch (not /docs). Serving through Github pages

• _site is .gitignored (that's where Jekyll puts its output)

• CNAME file for custom domain.

Jekyll configuration

• Added the github-pages gem in the Gemfile

• Ideally I would like to host this under a spygi.me/tech url but this is not possible with DNS since DNS works on another layer. For that I tried various combinations of the baseurl parameters in _config.yml in order to both run locally and still have CSS and other assets correctly linked in Github.io. At the end, I used a different subdomain with an APEX as explained here

Theme configuration

• Regarding themes the easiest way to publish on Pages is by using one of the Github pages supported themes. You simply add them on the Gemfile and _config.yml and you are done.
• I didn't find something that I liked so I added Travis integration following instructions from the Jasper 2 theme. The idea is by pushing to master, a Travis job is started to build the site with Rake and then push it to the gh-pages branch. For more details see the related post. This is not required anymore since Github added full support of any Github-located theme. I just use remote_theme: owner/name in _config.yml

Credits

Initial inspiration by Laurent Pellegrino's blog and Marco's though neither of the the 2 worked out of the box for me: Laurent's worked locally but when pushing on Github.io, CSS and other static assets where not linked correctly (tried various combinations of base_url and relative_url but then linking of the pages would not work) and Marco used the special user repo method which I want to keep free for other stuff.

Thanks to Michael aka mmistakes for the theme.