I have decided to use a blog to store descriptions for my hobby projects. While I have a server I decided not to use it for blogging, because I don’t want to maintain it.

I have a Github account, so I used Github Pages together with Jekyll.

Here’s a description how I did it on Windows with WSL and Visual Studio Code.

Installation

  1. Create a Github repository with the following name https://github.com/YourUsername/YourUsername.github.io, see also here.
  2. Clone the repo locally to your machine.
  3. Open your WSL command prompt.
  4. Install Ruby development tools, if necessary, see also here. E.g. sudo apt install ruby-dev
  5. Install needed gems with sudo gem install jekyll bundler github-pages
  6. Change directory to the local copy of the repo
  7. Create a new Jekyll site here with jekyll new .
  8. I use Visual Studio Code with the extension Markdown All In One. Open directory in Visual Studio Code.

  9. Add to the Gemfile

     source "https://rubygems.org"
 gem "github-pages", group: :jekyll_plugins
  10. Customize _config.yml, e.g. title, description, email, etc.
  11. Run bundle install and bundle update

Blogging

  1. To add a new blog post, add a file 2020-01-12-blogposttitle.markdown (change accordingly) to the sub-directory _posts. See existing files for hints how to format.
  2. Start blogging as markdown files.
  3. Build the site and make it available locally with bundle exec jekyll serve --no-watch
  4. You can now open the blog in your browser at http://127.0.0.1:4000.

Publish at Github

  1. Git Commit and Push all files to your Github repo.
  2. Github builds the page and after a couple of minutes it should be available at https://YourUsername.github.io