How it's made

First off, I want to say that I don’t aspire to make this the most informative source on how to implement a blog. Rather, this is more of an exercise in documentation for me. I will pay particular attention to the pitfalls I got snagged by. There are plenty of more authoritative sources out there, and I’ll reference them when appropriate.

From 5000 feet, here’s how this blog is implemented:

1. hosted on github pages
2. domain name is registered through register.com
3. uses Disqus for comments.

I started off with the github pages user site tutorial. Following it verbatim resulted in a very spartan site which displayed “Hello world” at rcarino.github.io.

My next step was to setup Jekyll locally. Jekyll is a tool which “Transform[s] your plain text into static websites and blogs”. Here’s an example: my posts are stored without any markup here. Using magic, jekyll will apply templating to these plaintext posts, infer numbered lists, paragraphs, and probably a bunch of other stuff I have yet to discover.

The jekyll documentation was a little too long for my attention span to handle, so I just followed the quickstart to install jekyll. Next, I auto generated scaffolding files to get my github pages to match the structure here, using this command

jekyll new rcarino.github.io # This should be your github pages directory

Jekyll will complain that the directory is not empty, so I used the command on an empty directory and moved the contents back into my github pages directory.

jekyll new stub # This should be your github pages directory
mv stub/* rcarino.github.io
cd rcarino.github.io
jekyll serve

The following site should be availabe on localhost:4000

To get the site prettier, I applied a premade theme by following the steps in this guide exactly.

This step smashes your index.html. example here, so you will have to port over the changes to the layouts/default.html, like so.

You should have something that looks mostly like my site now

Next, you’re probably not going to want a blah.github.io domain, so you’ll have to purchase a domain name from a registrar. I got mine from register.com via a promotion which lets me have my first year for $.50. Not sure if the 50 cent price-tag primed me to expect shady things in the future, but I used a Discover-one-time-use credit card number to finalize the purchase. I did not want to deal with any explosive recurring charges. discover secure online account numbers.

Link up your domain with the following tutorial. However, don’t use an apex/naked domain like example.com(the lack of www makes it naked FYI) with register.com. You’ll want to use a www.domain like this. Register.com won’t allow you to attach a cname to a naked domain. Here’s the register.com tutorial for making www.shaboyrayz.com point to rcarino.github.io.

Finally, I used Disqus for comments. Setting it up was stupid easy.

I’m still trying to learn the ropes with jekyll in terms of styling templates and using its plaintext markdown features. I’ve been scouring example source code here to pick up nifty things.

Next up on the agenda is to add tracking and maybe do some SEO optimizations to get my site higher up on google searches.