Nowadays, If I want to set up a blog, I have an immense number of options, all of which have different trade-offs in terms of cost, ease of use, etc. In the following post, I’ll try to explain my choice of platform, and help you in making an informed decision about which platform is the best for you.
What I needed
I needed a platform where i caould play around with each and every component of the blog, while not burdening myself with the hassles of hosting, domain registration etc. Also, I wanted to be able to put up, remove and edit posts quickly.
The options
From my initial google searches, the major contenders were Wordpress, Medium, Blogger, Wix and finally Jekyll. Almost all of those are free, apart from the .com version of wordpress, which allows you to focus on the content, while they do the rest of the work for you, similar to wix, which allows you to set up your blog in a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) environment, which is pretty cool for beginners. They have ads in the free version, which can be removed by upgrading your account.
Why Github Pages?
Github Pages provides free hosting for your github projects. It’s very easy to set up if you know your way around the git environment. It also provides a free github subdomain, which is another expense saved. If you already have a domain name, you can easily link that too. It’s also pretty well documented, so if you run into any problems, you can easily google them.
Why Jekyll?
Jekyll is a static site generator which allows you to generate and set up a website around your content very easily. I used Jekyll Themes, which has pre built themes for you to use, which makes your work even easier. A post update is just a git push away.
Putting it online
Assuming you have a github account, fork the Theme repo to your account, and change the branch from master to gh-pages. Create a branch if it does not already exist. Thats it. Your blog/website will be up and running. Use a git client to update any changes you make, and those will be updated on your site in a few seconds. I also found a step by step video that shows you the whole process.