On creating a hosted blogging site for free in a day.
Online blogging has gotten more and more popular in the last few years. Being a “tech influencer” or “thought leader” is seemingly a full-time occupation for some at this point.
A personal website can also be a great way to present yourself and your expertise to potential employers and collaborators .
So, you want to have an online presence, but why not just use a centralized platform like Twitter or Medium? Well for one - an eccentric billionaire could suddenly decide to initiate a hostile takeover of that platform and make tons of content policy changes at his/her own whim.
said billionaire
Or, that platform could decide to add intrusive ads and stick a paywall in front of your content.
So, what’s an aspiring blogger to do? You could go the full libertarian route and decide to self-host your website - giving you the full range of control.
However, most people are probably better off finding a middle ground that trades off some customization for ease of setup.Regardless, it’s a little intimidating given how many options you have - so I thought I’d share an approach that worked well for me and is most importantly completely free (for now).
The only things you’ll need to get this setup is some basic knowledge of git and a Github account order to use Github Pages.
Navigate to github.com and sign up if you don’t already have an account. If you sign up using a .edu email, you can get the GitHub Student Developer Pack which includes a bunch of other free developer goodies. This guide will still apply even if you don’t have a student account.
First, we need to create a Github Pages repository. This will store all the files and data for our site. What happens is that every time we update the contents of this repository, Github will handle delivering the changes to the live hosted version of the site.
Github Pages is powered by Jekyll, which is a static site generator. The code for Jekyll is a combination of html structural and markdown content files.
However, we aren’t going to start with a blank Jekyll website. Instead, we’re going to fork (which basically means copy for those of you unfamiliar with git-speak) an existing repository called academicpages. This project provides a set of Jekyll templates for a personal blog website that can be hosted on Github.
A screencap of what the academicpages site template looks like