What is jekyll and why use it ?
Jekyll is awesome
- Generate static pages: no db, no server code, just you and your content
- Fast ! As fast as your hosting can be
- Integrates with Github pages so give you free hosting option with the tools you already know and love
- Easy to change templating
- Clean and easy templating: great to improve your skills in web front end if you are like me more experienced on the server side coding
First integration to github
Being quite newbie to the process I did not realize at first that there is 2 ways to do it.
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You can use the default repo {name}.github.io (that you need to create at first). More here. This will use the master branch
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You can create any repository but the content of the site will have to be pushed to a branch called gh-pages (for GitHub Pages)
And this post clearly recap the choice you have and differences: A guide to using github pages
Choosing a theme
There is plenty of them available on the web. I chose Minimal Mistake because I like the simplicity of the design.
Other useful links
I found this post describing a from scratch install really useful. If you want show tags check out Charlie Park blog post on the subject.