TL;DR: Follow my journey through all the components of a basic blog, or just go straight to the guide that I ended up using

So my first post will be the process I went through to get this blog up and running.

I started with a simple “How to make a CS blog” google search. Initially I was shown the “3 main components” for running a blog: a web host, a domain, and the actual content (HTML/CSS/JS). The “web host” is just the server that the site will live on, and the content was suggested to be generated by WordPress, an extremely popular open source blog-generating software.

Now I already knew of Github Pages (GP) before this, and these guides were telling me to purchase server space from some web hosting provider like Digital Ocean or BlueHost. But GP is free! So what’s the difference?

Github Pages just serves static pages. If I wanted any sort of interactivity with my site, I’d need a server running my website in real time. However, this is just a basic blog, no need for that. So, now I don’t need to pay for web hosting.

The domain name would cost money, but I’m actually pretty ok with GP’s default URL for now. It’s just my name and an easy-to-remember suffix. Sweet, now I just need to generate some content.

WordPress has a plugin that allows you to generate static HTML, which I can then just push to my GP repo. But that still felt like a little too much, and it would prevent me from taking advantage of a lot of WordPress’s cool features. A broader Google search then pointed me to Jekyll, a framework for generating static-blogging content. This fairly comprehensive article got me through the process of creating a Jekyll blog on GP with advanced ease. The author even made a fork-and-go template, the one I used to start this very blog. It can’t get much easier.

In my Googling I also found Disqus, which is some sort of buff user-engagement service, but all I needed to know was that I could use it to add live commenting to my static blog.
Do I need this?

Not at all, boy

Do I want it?

Let me know what you think in the comments below, don’t forget to react and subscribe.