Late one night, possibly after too much cider, I bought okalyss.com. I’ve started giving technical meetup talks and the CFP submissions kept asking for a website URL. I felt lacking that I didn’t have one, but I definitely knew of things to write about and how to deploy a blog. So I decided to put a custom blog built with Jekyll (a static site generator) on my new domain.
I did this in two parts.
Part One: Developer Environment for Windows 10
I have a Windows 10 laptop I drag around for gaming at friends but I’ve heard good things about being able to use bash, so I searched for “enabling bash on Windows 10”. My developer environment at work is running macOS with iTerm2, Oh My Zsh, and I like Sublime Text 2 for my text editor.
I couldn’t use iTerm2 on a Windows machine so I jumped around various articles and guides until I found a good Windows 10 reccomendation. I found Owen Williams’s guide to fit. It included a new terminal recommendation and favored ruby development. My new terminal on Windows 10 is Hyper and I can still use Oh My Zsh.
Part Two: Starting a Jekyll project and deploying it
In part one, I was able to get through the initial installation with Ruby and bundler. I had to step off the guided path by using RubyInstaller. I already had bundler, so I was able to jump to the inital jekyll install command.
I was already in my target project directory, so in my terminal:
gem install jekyll
The next command on the Jekyll’s setup guide was jekyll new blog. This caught me up a bit. I expected the install to land inside my directory but, instead, it made a new subdirectory as target/blog/. My expectations were from using Middleman from a previous project. I opened up file explorer and dumped the /blog/ contents into the parent directory.
Next, a theme and support to use github pages.
gem install jekyll-swiss github-pages
Okay, great. Now I want to see what it looks like:
bundle exec jekyll serve
Hmm…I’m getting an error GitHub Metadata: No GitHub API authentication could be found. Some fields may be missing or have incorrect data.. A quick Google query tells me I can fix this by adding a new entry to my _config.yml:
github: description
Now I can use bundle exec jekyll build or bundle exec jekyll serve without error. Once I commited my changes to github, I jumped into my settings and set my custom domain for github pages with the target directory as master. After updating my domain name’s A records, I waited about an hour and my site was live.
Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to setup your own site with Jekyll.