Foster Irwin

A Utah Web Developer.

It seems fitting that for my first blog post, I should talk about… well, how I built the site that is displaying my first blog post! My website is built using Jekyll and being hosted on GitHub Pages. I looked at several options for hosting a website and none of them quite provided the exact granularity of control that I wanted. I was looking for something easy to maintain with low costs.

GitHub Pages was the perfect fit. Hosting is free. Seriously. You only have to pay for your domain name if you want one. Plus, you get to maintain your website just like any other repository. For someone that uses GitHub everyday, it’s a no brainer.

Jekyll is a static site generator that runs on Ruby and Liquid to produce static html files.

I found a remote template called minimal mistakes that I liked that kind of reminded me of GitHub’s design. I want the content to stand out, so I don’t want anything overly flashy. Not at this point in my career that is.

There are other templates that create a printable resume using Jekyll + Github Pages. Really we are just scratching the surface. Try searching for Jekyll projects on Github and you will be amazed at the things people are doing with it.