Introduction to Creating Websites with GitHub Pages and Jekyll
With GitHub Pages you can quickly create and publish a website for free! It is an ideal solution for creating a simple project, open educational resource, or personal site to highlight your academic work. Because hosting through gh-pages is free and builds valuable transferable skills, this is a great option for teaching and learning.
This workshop will introduce using free hosting from GitHub Pages integrated with the popular static website generator Jekyll. Along the way we will cover the basics of GitHub, HTML, Markdown, and Jekyll. You will learn how to set up a project repository, write content in Markdown, and publish your site, all using GitHub’s user friendly web interface. More advanced usage of Jekyll for local web development is introduced final section.
Each section of the workshop has a video embedded on the page (shot in Nov 2020). Alternatively, checkout the Go-Go GitHub Pages playlist on YouTube.
(note: this is an updated version of the earlier Go-Go GH-Pages workshop)
Workshop Prep
To get ready for this workshop, please create a free GitHub account if you don’t have one already. Once you create your account, you may need to verify your email before you can create content.
This workshop introduces GitHub Pages using GitHub’s web interface, demonstrating several ways to create gh-pages without using Jekyll locally. So, with your GitHub account in hand, you are all ready! The full development software is introduced in the final section for those wanting to go further.
Basic familiarity with the GitHub web interface and HTML will be helpful, but is not required. For quick introductions check out GitHub’s Hello World guide and w3schools HTML Tutorial.
Contents:
- Introduction to GitHub | topics: github; gh-pages; README; Markdown; HTML
- Introduction to Static Web and Jekyll | topics: static web; static generators; Jekyll
- Exploring Jekyll Basics via a Blog | topics: YAML; config.yml; front matter; index.md; posts
- Layouts, Includes, Data, & Liquid | topics: layouts; includes; data; Liquid; Liquid variables
- Developing with Jekyll | topics: text editor; git; ruby; Jekyll
Hosted by University of Idaho Library, 2020.
Theme: workshop-template-b by evanwill is built using Jekyll on GitHub Pages. The site is styled using Bootstrap with FontAwesome icons.
Content: CC BY-SA evan will 2020 (get source code). 