Hello World!
category: websites
date: June 25, 2016
I finally took the time to set up my home page on GitHub
Unfortunately it forced me to learn more about coding in HTML, CSS, YAML, and liquid than I ever cared to know. Fortunately I discovered a decent amount of blogs and tutorials online to be able to set up the website without too much pain.
Selecting Jekyll for generating the website
There are many different website technologies for creating static websites. Since I chose to host my website on GitHub (where I already have a repository for other projects), I decided to explore website technologies used by other GitHub users.
As it happens, GitHub has developed a website generator written in Ruby, called Jekyll, which has become very popular, so I chose to use Jekyll for building my website as well.
Selecting a Jekyll theme
A Jekyll theme is a set of HTML and CSS files that determine the appearance of a website, like fonts, colors, shading, and page layouts. A Jekyll theme can be adapted to create websites with the same appearance as the theme.
I wanted to choose a visually attractive theme, but with additional features, like a sidebar containing icons and text, with links to my website pages and to other websites. I chose to adapt the
Jekyll-Architect theme
by
Pietro Menna,
and the
Beautiful-Jekyll theme
by
Dean Attali.
Here you can find more: Jekyll themes.
I also added Disqus comments to my blog posts.
You’re welcome to adapt my website for your own needs
You can download the website files using the buttons on the right sidebar.
You can read about how to set up this website in the README.md file. But be aware that this website isn’t a static website theme, but rather it’s a complete website, and its contents change over time.
Please follow the same copyright rules as those for the original website themes that it’s based on.
Building websites using R Markdown and knitr
I use R for all my work, so in the future I may also try building my websites using R Markdown and knitr. Here are some references about building websites using R Markdown and knitr:
Building websites using R Markdown and knitr
Hacking htmlwidgets into website using rmarkdown
Hacking htmlwidgets into website using Jekyll