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This blog post is about setting up a personal website, so let’s roll up our sleeves and get cracking.
The goal here is to point readers who are thinking about setting up a personal website in the right direction. What do you want out of your personal website? In my case, I wanted a versatile website that I could use for a few different purposes. Specifically, I wanted a website that could serve (no pun intended) as a professional landing page, a personal blog, and to host music that I’ve composed over the years. Wordpress runs approximately 25% of the internet as of Dec 2015, so initially I was going to go with Wordpress since the large adoption rate must mean it’s easy to use. However, I had a Wordpress blog maybe 5 years ago but it was a little clunky, and I wanted to try out some new tech. So I got in touch with a friend of mine who has done a lot of web development over the years, and he suggested I give Jekyll a shot.
Jekyll is a static site generator that is blog-aware and creates mobile/tablet/web-friendly websites. In my opinion, if you’re going to use Jekyll, you probably need a bit of a programming background or you need to be willing to get frustrated along the way, which might undermine the fun of creating a website (remember, pain is a part of the learning process :D). To start, I needed a GitHub account. I already had one through some prior programming work. For those who don’t know, GitHub is a website that allows you to have code repositories online, so you can collaborate with other people on a codebase, keep version histories of your code so you can revert to previous versions if you ever make a mistake, and access your code from anywhere you have an internet connection. GitHub allows you to host one personal website for free on GitHub Pages at the address yourname.github.io, which was definitely a plus for me.
Once you have a GitHub account, the next step is to find a Jekyll theme that you like. Basically, all I did was search free Jekyll themes, and, through a brutal process of trial and error, I finally settled on a theme. Honestly, I had to try about 5-10 themes before I settled on one that I liked. The instructions were incomplete or incorrect for a few of the free Jekyll themes which was pretty frustrating. The process was quite cumbersome overall, and the workflow of trying out different themes is far easier with Wordpress. Here is the process of trying out a theme on Jekyll in more detail:
https://github.com/yourname/yourname.github.io, then add a CNAME file to your GitHub repository at https://github.com/yourname/yourname.github.ioI have left Joomla, Drupal, and buying themes such as those sold on themeforest.net out of the discussion on what platform you should build your website with. My understanding is that Drupal is overkill for a basic personal website, Joomla is somewhere in the middle in terms of complexity, and I didn’t want to spend much money so I did not entertain the idea of buying a theme from themeforest. Moreover, there are websites like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Simbla, etc., which have very basic themes or allow you to drag and drop to create a website; I’ve used a couple of these before but typically they have some branding that you can’t remove or require some sort of fee. If you need a website up quickly though, they are definitely an option and worth considering. This article was mainly about Jekyll versus Wordpress though, and in summary, here are the advantages/disadvantages of Jekyll vs. Wordpress that I can see:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
My overall thoughts are that this whole exercise was more complicated than expected, but it was also rewarding to learn a bit about Jekyll. Hopefully this helped someone out there! Signing off for now. Godspeed.