Blogging with Jekyll on GitHub Pages

Finally, managed to create a blog with Jekyll on Github pages. Have been thinking of writing a blog for a while, but had put it off as I imagined the effort required to create and maintain it will be beyond me. However, this circuit breaker has given me some time and opportunity to finally figure this out and get to work.

About me

My name is YuXuan Tay, I am a data scientist from Singapore. The primary purpose of this blog will be as an outlet for me to share my technical learnings and thoughts. Given my background, the content will likely to be on data science applications with Python.

What it took

Part of the reason it had taken me so long to set up this blog was due to setting up and understanding Jekyll on Github pages. Jekyll is written in Ruby which was intimidating as I imagined I would have to familiarise myself with another programming language and its ecosystem. Turned out, it did take a bit of effort, but was not as scary as I imagined.

Other reasons were that I have a few specific feature requirements on setting up a blog as follows.

Free: free forever, assuming manageable viewership
Little fuss: as few components as required for blog preview, deployment and hosting
Ownership: content wholly owned and controlled by myself
Search: article search feature
Comments: readers are able to leave comments on articles
Analytics: Google Analytics for tracking

The first 3 points are clearly fulfilled by Github pages. They are part of the reasons why I did not consider using Medium or Wordpress. However, Jekyll can get a bit complicated if I want to make specific customisations. Fortunately, there are many Jekyll themes available with good layout and features, hence I do not really have to get my hands dirty with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, as long as my needs are common.

The last 3 points are fulfilled by the Jekyll theme I am using: Minimal Mistakes by Michael Rose. It is quite a rich theme including features such as responsive layout, feed and sitemap. A few additional features that I really liked are search engine optimisation and social sharing.

Other than configuring those features, I have also taken the effort to create proper about me and 404 pages. Please take a look!

What is next

Given the amount of effort I have spent figuring out Jekyll on GitHub Pages, I thought it will be a good idea to share my understanding over a couple of posts. Rather ironic given my original purpose of sharing on data science applications. However, I am not going to let those content go to waste.

Thank you for reading!

Update: below are my completed posts on Jekyll and GitHub Pages.