Making my Last Blog

Follow my (last) journey through all the components of a basic (jekyll) 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. :money_with_wings: 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?

No, not at all

...

Do I want it?

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

Note from Future Gabe:

No, you didn't really want it. I will not be adding it back.