A simple personal website recipe

There are many ways to create a simple personal website, but Alexandre (bobylito) -who’s far more of an expert on the subject than I am- recommended Jekyll when I asked for advice.

Advantages

• It’s static. It’s less messy and less risky. Apparently, WordPress sites suffer greatly from hacking attempts. A static website like this one should be a safer choice.
• It’s free. Well the software is, first of all, free and open-source, but additionally hosting is also free, if you choose github.
• It’s pretty simple and straight-forward. Once you RTFM a little bit, you’re up and running and you only need to create simple files on your git repository in order to add a new page/post.
• It’s pretty. Well, at least, I think it is. You can customize as much as you want or use Jekyll themes.
• You get extra cool points for being a web hipster. Or in any case, fashionable.

So here’s how it all went down with this website.

Ingredients

• Jekyll
• Github.io-compatible Github repository
• Hyde Jekyll theme
• vim (yay!)

Directions

1. Go create a Github Page. Follow the instructions there, and you should be set.
2. Fill that website with a fake empty index.html including only two words (“caca boudin”) and leave it inactive for several months. Hope nobody accidentally finds it.
3. Realize you will soon be looking for a job and you should do something about it. Forget you had a website altogether.
4. Try and fit your multi-page CV in a single page and realize it could be useful to host the full version somewhere and add a link.
5. After an epiphany you remember you had a website and a silly sounding domain name. Register a new professional looking domain name on gandi.
6. Ask Alexandre what would be a good static website template or tool. Hear him give his Jekyll speech another time -but this time is for you, special snowflake!
7. Browse jekyll themes because no way you’re going to make something decent looking on your own.
8. Find hyde and feel that special connection, like you knew you were meant for each other (but in another colour variant, because snowflake).
9. Checkout that git repo into your own, completely ignoring the example index.html Alexandre had made for you.
10. Trial and error until you make something that vaguely resembles what you were looking for.
11. Ask Alexandre how to git squash, because you feel ashamed your coolness factor will be greatly reduced once one bothers to check the commit history.
12. Write a very marginally useful post about it, just showing off that you found a Markdown Cheatsheet on google.
13. ???
14. Profit [Note: This should be number 99, but I didn’t study that Markdown tutorial well enough, apparently.]

PS. There are other people who have written about similar setups, and you might find them more informative. This post by Joshua Lande is one of the good ones.

So, this is not a real blog, after all, so we’re going to use twitter to give it a social/interactive feeling.