First Jekyll Blog Post!

The past

While I have previously used Ghost blogging engine which is certainly a great blogging engine to use, I found the limitations of hosting on Azure and the manual updating process a bit too combersome and time consuming for my liking. One solution was to have Ghost host it for me, but the $19USD (which is about $28AUD) cost per month seems a bit excessive for me, as I am not a heavy blogger.

Where to from here?

I asked around and there seemed to be a fair bit of love for the Jekyll + GitHub Pages approach to personal blog hosting. I looked into it further and it certainly seems intriguing.

New Theme

The default Minima theme that comes with Jekyll is functional, but pretty basic and I felt I needed something more. I stumbled across the Minimal Mistakes theme and found that really suitable! Well worth checking out!

The one tip I have though, if you are starting out like me, is to create a clone of the Minimal Mistakes repository and go from there. I seemed to have the most success with that approach!

What editor?

Since all the posts are created in markdown on your local computer first before being committed to your github repository what editor should you use? Wel there are plenty to choose from, but the one ticking my boxes at the moment is Visual Studio Code.

It has a great real-time markdown editor and preview pane and is great for reading other text files as well plus a large and powerful plugin library. Having a git client built right into the editor too is the icing on the cake.

So what about the articles written in your ghost blog?

They have all been imported over to this new site. Thankfully the ghost articles are also markdown so there was not much change required to get them up and running.

A way forward

So I shall see how this goes, and hope for the best!