Create your own Blog with Jekyll

If you want to build small page or blog and want to rely on a static site generator instead of using a fully fledged CMS, this article is for you.

Every once in a while I think about creating a personal website. Something I could maybe use as an online CV, portfolio or a little blog. For the beginning, nothing special. It would be easy to spin up a Wordpress page, find a nice template and within short time it would be ready to use. But first of all, I think it would be an overkill to use a big CMS with all it’s crazy features for “just” a small page with few sites that don’t change often plus a bunch of blog posts.

That’s why I want to try a static site generator to see the alternatives. For this article, I chose Jekyll because it works well in combination with GitHub Pages.

Let’s start with the prerequisites and then create our own little website with Jekyll.

Install Ruby and Jekyll

To work with Jekyll, you need Ruby installed on your computer. If you don’t have it installed, have a look here for the install documentation.

Next, install Jekyll and also the bundler you need:

gem jekyll bundler

Create your page

Usually, a Jekyll site is created by executing jekyll new mypagename where mypagename is the name of the folder which is created during the process.

Congratulations, you just created your first site with Jekyll. Basically it consists of two pages (index.md and about.md) and a blog post.

The default Jekyll website

Now assuming that we want to use that template, we may want to fill in some data to get rid of that placeholder texts. So open the _config.yaml and happy changing! (Note: If you change the values within the config file you will have to restart the serving process to see the changes)