How I launched my blog with free of cost and the minimum efforts?
Describes how to use available tools for blogging and launch a personal blog with a customised domain without paying any penny.
As I promised in my previous article “How I have relaunched my website?”, I will show you the best and quick way to launch your blog. I have tried numerous free tools for publishing my blog but they were either too complex one or chargeable. I had clear requirements that a blogging platform should have:
- Easy to publish blogs and also easy to edit them
- Free of cost
- Customisable domain
After reviewing many online blogging tools, I found Github Pages most fitting into my requirements. For Github Pages, I am assuming you are aware of “Jekyll”, a templating framework. If not, then, I will suggest visiting https://jekyllrb.com/docs/. Jekyll is a very interesting framework. It’s built-in Ruby programming language but requires very less programming skills to use it.
Here are the steps:
- Install Jekyll. Go to https://jekyllrb.com/docs/ and follow the simple steps to install Jekyll on your laptop. They are straight forward. Even non-developer can follow them and install it.
- Get Blog theme from Jekyll store https://jekyll-themes.com/. This is one of the points which inspired me to select Jekyll. It provides an initial starting point. Jekyll had a wide range of themes from which you can select one. There are some free themes as well.
- Create a new blog post using markdown language and put it under `_posts` folder of the theme. You can read more about this special folder here: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/
- Create a new repository in Github named: <github-username>.github.io. This step is a very simple one. You need to go to Github and create a new repository with the name <github-username>.github.io. This is a special pattern to create a repo. Github will automatically bind this repo with URL https://<github-username>.github.io. This is done by Github Pages. If you don’t have your own domain, then you can use this URL for your blog.
- Push your code to this new repository. You need to connect your Github repo with your local theme. When you will create a new repo, Github will provide the necessary steps to complete this point. If you lost those steps or not able to find them go to https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/importing-your-projects-to-github/adding-an-existing-project-to-github-using-the-command-line.
- You can add your domain for https://<github-username>.github.io by visiting `Settings` of your repo. Under Settings, you will find “GitHub Pages” section. There you need to add your domain i.e. blog.mayurkumar.info. Follow this doc for reference: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/working-with-github-pages/managing-a-custom-domain-for-your-github-pages-site#configuring-a-subdomain. You also need to add one CNAME record to your domain. Also, note that we discussed adding subdomain for our github.io URL. You can find more about the supported domain here: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/working-with-github-pages/about-custom-domains-and-github-pages#supported-custom-domains.
That’s it. Your blog is live. I have launched my blog https://blog.mayurkumar.info using the above steps only. You can visit it for a practical demo. Still, I am migrating my previous posts to this new blog so you may find some old posts there till I will complete the migration. Please let me know in comments if you have any questions or suggestions on these steps.
Call To Action
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About Author
Mayurkumar is helping companies to take the stress out of software development and make their business shine. He has more than eight years of experience in designing and building scalable applications using different technologies.
Thank you for reading my article. Read more at https://mayurkumar.info
