When searching where to host our team’s blog we wanted to stay close to the community that we were trying to give back to. Github Pages immediately stood out and with the cost of $0 it’s perfect. Github Pages allows us to keep using the same tools we use everyday in Development for Blogging.

Where to Start?

The first thing you will want to do is choose a static site generator. To make it easy for you I’ve read through quite a bit material and the top 2 imo are:

• jekyll (ruby)
• cabin (javascript)

Both have their advantages but since I need some material for the next Ruby Meetup we are going to start this blog with using Jekyll.

Getting Started

Github Pages is straight forward and easy to follow.

Jekyll is even easier to install gem install jekyll

There are a ton of resources and tools from here to get you started with Jekyll. One of the most common is Octopress. But I like starting from something even more basic. That’s where I found Poole.

Even more so let’s start from one of its themes Hyde. Download the source code and extract it into our new project.

Let’s take a look at the file structure. You will see some files/folders with underscores. Every thing without an underscore will get copied into to the _site folder on build.

If you open up /_layouts/post.html you will see handlebars used for injecting content. This is using the Liquid Markup Language.

Configuring Poole

There are few things we will need to do configure Poole

• First, unelss you are using a custom domain is to remove the CNAME file, otherwise edit it with your domain.

• Second, let’s set customize the _config.yml to fit our blog.

• Third, remove the default blog posts under the _posts folder and write your our first post.

That’s it! Now run jekyll build Commit and push!

You can add Disqus Comments and customize it a ton of different ways. Good luck