Ultimate blog experience

This post is about me discovering and using Jekyll as a site generator and also finding Github Pages and hosting through github and the workflow connected to theese.

Being a developer and wanting to have a plattform to express your thoughts and experiment, also sharing these, a blog is a must.

Thinking of a own-hosted open-source plattform, the first thing to cross many minds would be Wordpress. I’ve had a lot of experience publishing content with Wordpress (Read more: wordpress season). But now I’m rather tired of it. I constantly redesign some parts of my blog, I’m never satisfied with the experience nor the color palette. Or maybe something needs fixing with the layout..

Since I read a lot of blogs and a lot of blogs about development and by developers it must not have been that high odds that I would come across an article about hosting sites on github and also using a static site generator.

Say hello to Jekyll

For me to enjoy a tool, any tool, it needs to be flexible and easy to make it change the flow of things.

I’ve heard that other developers use static site generators of diffrent flavors. And since i look up to them and go to them for inspiration and look to them to see where the internet of things are going. Of course a static site generator was interesting and something to checkout.

This is how i came across and decided give Jekyll a season.

Multi-flavoured

The flexibility you get is that it pretty much accepts any format for pages and posts: You could write your posts in markdown or html or both!

Custom layouts

It is really easy to custom style your posts or pages, with the way layouts work, you can have diffrent layouts for diffrent things. I have set it up in the way that with one of my layouts, it loads in a custom CSS of my choice imba! In the future I could even set it up in a way that it even would load in a custom javascript file.

Checkout what Jekyll is and how to install (super easy!)

Next level hosting

Ever since getting into git and version controlling all the stuff that are worth version controll and not, I’ve really gotten into it. Part of the thing is being in the terminal looking like a badass ‘git commit’-ing and ‘git checkout -b newfeature’-ing like a hacker, and it feels good.


I’m not sure if the feature; hosting through github is new or just unexploited but.. it.. is.. pure genious!!


Add, Commit, Merge, Push… Live!

I’ve dreamt of projects where you could just push your commits to the master-branch and the changes got published.. Of course with the benefit of launches going wrong you could just revert to the last working commit in an instant.

This is pretty much how Github Pages work: You push your changes to the master branch or the gh-page depending on what kind of repo you got.

And now that I found github pages AND jekyll things were just flashing before my eyes and some flashing stopped and I waited for the domain to get pointed where it now is now:

epantzar -> erikpantzar.github.io

Wordpress Season

I’ve had fully static page, but for the most part I’ve hosted my own site and sometimes blog on Wordpress wich is a really nice plattform for blogging or just building sites in. During this time I have learnt a lot about how Wordpress works and what you can do with the tool and how to develop themes. In the meanwhile in my day to day work, a lot of WP projects were done, so the both worlds fit together and gained from each other.

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