Site intro

I set up this GitHub pages site to experiment with Jekyll, a Ruby static site generator. The site uses Cotes Chung’s Chirpy theme and is based on the chirpy-starter repo.

I originally built my own VSCode devcontainer and manually created a file structure for the project. That worked ok and was good for learning about how things fit together, but when I started looking at changing the appearance of the site, I realised I could have just forked an existing Jekyll theme repo

The starter repo has it’s own devcontainer files, so I just needed to customise the _config.yml and files in the _data directory to use my details and then add my own content.

Everything can be developed locally in VSCode. Running the bundle exec command starts the local Jekyll server and the site can then be viewed on port 4000.

bundle exec jekyll s --incremental   

The remote site is hosted in GitHub pages and deployed using a GitHub Action triggered by a commit to the deployment branch.

I have’t made many modifications to the Chirpy defaults other than to add jemoji and change the favicons, but these were all straightforward and well-documented online.

Overall, this was a quick and easy way to set up a simple site for text-based docs or blogging, and there are are many other Jekyll themes available for other usecases.