Setting up the Chirpy Theme and Jekyll

I thought a good first post would be how I set up this site. It was quite a learning experience and took longer than expected due to all the rabbit holes I ventured down that I probably should have avoided.

I opted to go the free hosting route because I’m cheap. Unfortunately, as with almost everything free, it required quite a bit of work on my end to figure out how to make it work and to make it look nice. GitHub Pages and Jekyll seemed to fit pretty much everything I wanted so I chose that stack for my website build. This stack satisfies the main requirement, cost, as well as a few other nice features:

• All site updates are tracked in my repository
• Jekyll has many themes to choose from
• Working with Markdown is straightforward
  • Just be aware that a lot of themes will have their own special markdown for advanced things like callouts
• There is a pre-built Dev Container for VSCode to build the site locally for preview before pushing to GitHub
  • One limitation is that the Dev Container doesn’t check for broken links during the build process. Sometimes I will accidentally link to the .md file instead of .html or make a typo. These errors go undetected unless I manually inspect the links, which isn’t caught until the change is pushed to GitHub and I see the build fails
• There are many VSCode extensions to help with coding

The resources for this guide are all in pages on this site. Here is a sitemap for all my pages.

1. The first step is to get a new domain if you plan on using a custom domain
   • Set up DNS
2. Install WSL
3. Install Docker Desktop

   Make sure you installed WSL so Docker Desktop can use it

4. Install git
5. Install VSCode
6. Set up Jekyll

Once you follow through the steps above you should have a shiny new web page on a custom domain waiting for you to add content.