Over the years I have tried various platforms to store my ideas. Wordpress, trac, redmine, blogger and a few others in between and although they are all great platforms often little issues that made the process cumbersome.

With that in mind I started searching again with a few new requirements:

  • I don’t want to host the software or worry about keeping it up to date with security patches.
  • Styling and updating needs to be fast and easy. Without the need to learn a complicated theme format and variables.
  • Support local development that is simple to setup and sync between the various computers I use.
  • Syntax highlighting for code samples with support for a good set of languages.

And after a bit of research it appears that I have found my candidate.

Setting up Jekyll and GitHub pages

There are a ton of different online resources covering the setup and install process so I won’t go to much into detail on that front. Instead I here are links to the pages and tutorials that I followed to get started.

  • jekyllrb.com - The Jekyll website
  • pages.github.com - General instructions on how to get your initial GitHub pages repository setup.
  • jekyllbootstrap.com - All the tools needed to get a working scaffold very quickly. Also provides rake tasks to help with common tasks.