Blogging is a great way to share your thoughts and observations. There are many reasons why one might want to start a blog.
- record your thoughts/observations
- create instructions for a process/tool
- practice writing
- build an audience/online presence
- show off your projects
These are just a few of the many good reasons you should start a blog. I wanted to share a quick post about how to start a blog using Github Pages. Github Pages is awesome, super easy to set up, and free! The content is hosted directly from your Github repository. All you need to do is add/edit your files, commit them, and add. And the changes will be live. Let’s see how we can get started.
Step 1: Create your repo
You start by creating your repo in Github. The title of your repo must be your username.github.io. Please see the image below.
Step 2: Clone your repo to your computer
Now you have to clone the repo to your computer so you can work on it. A simple git command from the terminal
git clone repo.name
will download the repo to whichever directory you are working in.
Step 3: Find a website template
The next step is to decide what kind of website you would like to build. There are an infinite amount of options, templates, and website generators available. I’m personally using Jekyll, which is a simple static site generator. There are advantages and disadvantages for using a site generator versus writing your own HTML/CSS/JS, but I won’t go into the specifics for this blog post. For this example, I’m going to download a free Twitter Bootstrap template from Start Bootstrap. I’ve chosen a template called <a href=http://startbootstrap.com/template-overviews/freelancer/ target=_blank>”Freelancer”</a>.
Step 4: Download the template
Now download the files of the Freelancer bootstrap template.
Step 5: Add, commit, push to repo
You’re almost finished! Hopefully you are familiar with using git. What you will do now is move the files to your cloned github repo folder. Then add, commit, and push the changes to git.
If you refresh your Github repo page, you can see the added files now.
Step 6: Profit!
We’re done! We don’t have any content yet, but our website is up and running and you can find it at username.github.io.
You will want to update your website with your own information, blog posts, project information, etc. Whenever you do add content, all you need to do is add, commit, and push. And your changes will be live.
Hack Reactor Week 2 Recap
Now that we’ve gone through two full weeks of Hack Reactor, I feel like I’m in a good groove. The program is very structured, and I appreciate that there are little to no breakdowns in the schedule. It is, for lack of a better word, a very well-oiled machine. We have weekly assessments to check our progress in the past week. We also have weekly small group sessions where we take a step back from all the code and computer science and share about our goals, our experiences, and various other topics. It was refreshing to be able to get away from the computers and just connect with our peers and mentors.
In our second week we went over:
- inheritance patterns
- algorithms
- browser apps, jQuery, and AJAX
- browser security and escaping
And we probably touched on a host of other topics during the week.
I’m enjoying my time here. I’m learning a great deal, growing as a developer, as a problem-solver, and as a person. The long schedule hasn’t been too difficult so far, and I’m trying to maximize the time I have the next 2.5 months. During that time, my goal is to write a blog post at least once a week. Until next time!