A new blog site

At the start of 2019, I decided to move my blog site to a new platform. Earlier my blog site was hosted on Wordpress and it worked just fine. However, back then I didn’t know about Jekyll and GitHub pages. First and foremost, I am not a web developer so this change was difficult for me at the start but how else are you going to learn new things if you don’t try? 😊

Here are a few reasons why I switched my blog site hosting platform:

Presentation

It looked so different and nice when I first published a blog using Jekyll. For me the way the blog got displayed was much better than the old platform.

Customization

This is probably the number 1 reason why I started using Jekyll. I pretty much like to customize everything. With this new platform, I feel like I have more control over what and how I want to publish. I mostly work on the terminal to work on AWS, Ansible, and Docker 🐳. Hence, if I write a script or a code and present it then I like to make sure that it gets displayed correctly. As you write your blogs in markdown, it gives you several options to add your code, insert a YouTube video, and much more.

Free hosting!

Jekyll is free and works well with GitHub pages. You can write blogs or make changes on the go and deploy your changes to GitHub quickly. There are a lot of Jekyll themes that you can use if you don’t want to start from scratch.

What I miss…

Nothing. 😊

Issues faced and lessons learned

Finally, I want to talk about the issues that I faced and the lessons that I learned from this.

  • Many Jekyll themes that I took a look at didn’t work after I forked them. I checked my configuration multiple times but couldn’t figure it out. Hence, finding the right theme was a challenge.

  • Once I found the right theme, I had to learn how the website was built. Since I had no prior experience of web development, it was really difficult to figure out how everything was linked.

  • Once I had my blog site up and running, I reviewed it multiple times for errors and issues. I found that the discussion section was working and it was throwing an error. I checked the html files related to Disqus but had no luck. In the end, I figured out after looking online that I had to create an account with a third party tool called Disqus. As Disqus had no idea about my blog domain, it wasn’t working.