Five Minutes to Your Own Website

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Jekyll is a simple static site generator. This means it takes plain text files and renders them as a website that can then be served to the web through a web hosting service. One option for this service is GitHub Pages, free “websites hosted and easily published through GitHub.”
With Jekyll + GitHub Pages, the source files for your website live in a GitHub repository that is automatically published to the web. Basically, Jekyll transforms text documents in a repository into a website and then that website is hosted by GitHub. The only thing you have to worry about is writing posts and editing a few of the text files to make things look how you want. As the Jekyll design philosophy states:
Jekyll gets out of your way and allows you to concentrate on what truly matters: your content.
You can follow this guide on GitHub to set up a new blank website. However, if you’re looking to make a simple blog as quick as possible, a better option is to fork (a GitHub term meaning copy) the Jekyll Now repository which already has a blogging layout built and ready to be published.
After forking, go into the repository settings under your account and change the name to username.github.io.
Fork the Jekyll Now repository and change the name to username.github.io
Within a few minutes, you’ll be able to navigate to username.github.io in your browser and see your new website published on the web! It’s not really yours yet, but you can fix that in a few steps.
Default Jekyll Now website
You can edit any of the website files locally by cloning the repository and opening them in your favorite text editor. Then, when you commit and push your changes to GitHub, the website will automatically update. However, instead of local editing, I highly recommend the online Prose editor.

Prose Editor

Prose makes it much easier to see all of your files, quickly make changes, and commit and push them to GitHub as soon as you save. You’ll have to authenticate Prose with GitHub and then you can start improving your blog. For example, to begin personalizing the website, edit the _config.yaml file:
Editing _config.yaml in Prose editor.
After hitting save, these changes can be seen online.
Website after making changes to config file.

Writing Blog Posts

All blog posts in Jekyll are written in Markdown, a lightweight language that was made to be converted to HTML or many other formats. It’s extremely easy to learn, is ubiquitous on the web, and provides plenty of opportunities for customizing your posts beyond what you can do on Medium.
The posts for your website are located in the _posts/ folder and as you edit and save the files in Prose, you’ll be able to see them appear on your blog. Follow the naming convention: date-title.md and your post will automatically appear correctly named and dated on your site.
Editing Markdown document in Prose (left) and post as is appears on website (right).
If you already have posts on Medium, you can convert these to Markdown using this Chrome extension or this command line tool. The conversion isn’t perfect, but with a few edits, you’ll be able to quickly export your Medium work to your blog. Here’s an article I wrote about going from existing Medium articles to Markdown that addresses several problems I found.

Going Further

The benefit of your own website is you can control every aspect of how things look and add any features you want. Start by digging through the files in the repository and looking at the Jekyll documentation. For example, to change fonts and styling, edit the style.scss file, and to enable functions such as comments on posts, edit the _config.yaml. You can even use a custom domain name by purchasing one through a web domain registrar like Hover and following this guide.
The nice thing about Jekyll is that if you just want to focus on writing, you can leave the defaults and you’ll have a clean, presentable blog. If you feel like making changes, then you can go as far as you want. For instance, I’ve added a live code editor to my about page to make it more interesting:
Live coding editing on my about page.

Conclusions

If you’ve been holding off on making a blog because you were concerned about the time or cost, then now is the time to get started. With GitHub Pages and Jekyll, you can have your own blog in five minutes for free!
As a reminder, the steps are:
  1. Fork the Jekyll Now repository to your GitHub account.
  2. Rename the repo to username.github.io . Your website is now published.
  3. Make changes to website files in the Prose online editor and save to update the website. Get started by changing _config.yaml and adding your markdown posts in _posts/.
  4. Extend / customize the website as much as you want by reading documentation, looking at other websites, or just experimenting
For anyone who already has Medium posts, here’s a guide for moving them to Markdown. If you don’t, then here’s some help for writing about data science projects. Finally, get out there and build a website to call your own!
As always, I welcome comments and feedback. I can be reached on Twitter @koehrsen_will or at my personal GitHub pages website willk.online.

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