In my last article, I said that a “simple Jekyll template would’ve [been perfect for my portfolio and the smart choice], but I’ve relatively overengineered this website”. Well I am going to show you how to not overengineer your own personal blog website and be smart about it.

Creating the Jekyll project.

Yes we’re using Jekyll, and you’ll understand why later. There’s a useful guide on the Jekyll website for setting up the requirements. Once you’ve done that, you can create a new Jekyll project with the following command:

jekyll new my-awesome-blog
cd my-awesome-blog
bundle add webrick
code . # or your preferred code editor
bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload

And you can now open it in your browser at http://localhost:4000.

Customization

You can customize the blog in the _config.yml file, it’s self expalantory. You can also add new posts in the _posts folder, and they will be automatically added to the blog. Sometimes it doesn’t reload the config file on change so you may have to restart the server.

Deployment

You can deploy this website for free, without any (real) vendor lock in. First create a Github account (if you haven’t already). Then, create a github repo and call it YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io. Now we need to initialize a git repo inside of the jekyll project. First run

git init && git add . && git commit -m "init" && git branch -M main
git remote add origin YOUR_GITHUB_LINK.git && git push -u origin main

Wait a few minutes, and then go to https://YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io and you should see your blog.