Introduction

Hi, today I want to tell you how I have created this simple bog. Not because there aren’t good tutorials out there, but just because.
Important disclaier, actually I dont know anything about jekyll nor github pages, this post is just my experience creating this blog.

Prequisites

I assume that you already know what it is github pages and you already have an account on GitHub.

Steps

Github repository

Yeap, without losing time let go and choose a theme that you like. The idea is really simple, just select a github respository that you like and fork it.
To do this I recommend the following sites:

where you can chose any of them.
I think that is a good idea to look for a theme that provide as many feature as you want, this will save you time.
Some of the nice-to-have features can be: Task runner to generate statis assets like CSS and JS if any, use LESS or SASS, provide a Search, contact us, a good help, etc.
If you decide to start from scratch, you are reading the wrong tutorial.
After fokring the choosen repo please very the following points:

Remove all generic or personal information depending on where you fork from.
Verify the branch name (it should be called master for personal sites)

Test Locally

As a good idea to start validating the posting workflow fetch your repo and make it work locally.

Install gem deps
Install npm deps (if any)
Edit _.config.yml file
Remove (just at this point) if present the CNAME file
Run it

To do all this I strongly recommend using Cloud9 IDE, which by the way is the IDE I am using to write this blog.

If you use Cloud9 use the following command.

jekyll serve --host $IP --port $PORT --drafts

If you are testing this on you local pc

jekyll serve --drafts

As you can imagine –drafts also generate post for each file in the _draft folder.
Note: if you have updated to Jekyll 3, or just if you are unable to see some of the post/file that you have created, check the date (in the file name) to verify it is not in the future, if it is the case add the parameter: –future

Finnaly remember to add a License file, first to respect the repo you have forked and secondly to known what is possible to do with the content of your blog.

Create a post

All files in the _posts folder are posts, the only thing you need to follow is the name convention (YYYY-MM-DD)-\<file-name>.md. This is optional for the _draft folder.
In the each post follow the header format (front matter), meta-data used for the site generation.

When you are ready just push your changes to github.

Extra features

I will update this section as I continue adding new features into this blog.

Concat us

This simple feature is not trivial in static websites, but as usual there is a solution. In my case I have chose the free solution provided by formspree.
If you need an example of how to use it just the the HTML of my site.

Custom Domain

Firstly, buy a domain. Namecheap is a very good options, it is not just cheap but also the support is really good. (I dont want to sell it to you, but as far as I could see it was the best).
Once you have your domain folow these steps.

Comments

In order to add comment in your site you only need an account on Disqus, I can image that there are tons of different providers for this, I just dont care.
I recommend the following posts to accomplish this:

Obvious and good resources

Finally some other links that are good to know if you are interested in createing a blog.

https://jekyllrb.com/
https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-as-a-static-site-generator-with-github-pages/
https://help.github.com/articles/using-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/

As it obvious, this post is just a brief overview that does not intent to be comprenhensive.