As soon as I learned that one can host their own website on GitHub, I decided to go for it. This is the result of my incursion into that territory.
I am always up for adventure, hence I decided to create something slightly more sophisticated than a plain html+css site. GitHub itself recommends Jekyll, a static webpage compositor, which is integrated in GitHub Pages. I decided to give it a try, it didn't seem that complicated.
The headaches came with the theming part: after researching a bit, I found a theme which I found appealing, Hyde (or, rather, its Hydeout version, available in this repository ). In the end I managed to subjugate it and damn, does it seem cool.
This repo's structure follows closely that of the original repository: the homepage is contained in index.html, with each page refered to in the sidebar lies in the categories/ directory. Blog posts (WIP) will be kept in the _posts/ directory, if I ever write any.
Each page has a header, read by Jekyll, telling Jekyll about the needed layout, the title of the page and whether it should be included in the sidebar or not. Layouts themselves are stored in _layouts/, I have barely touched them. Html chunks are also stored in their original directory, _includes/, and are called using Liquid syntax (e.g. {% include timeline.html%}). Finally, .scss style files are contained in _sass/hydeout/, then called by _sass/hydeout.scss and this is itself imported by assets/css/main.scss.
I have, however, made a few changes: some css and html includes have been removed as I do not intend to use them, for instance those related to RSS and tags. Other smaller ones too, such as those related to a back arrow.
I have also included two folders, files/ and imgs/, where some PDFs and images can be found (although refering to them within the code was quite painful).
Jekyll is built with the Ruby language. While I know nothing about that language, and the components surrounding it, I still managed to set this site up and fix some errors along the way.
After cloning this repository, navigate to the folder, and run bundle install. AFAIK this reads the content of the Gemfile file (containing gems, which are like libraries, and remote sources from which gems can be downloaded), and installs all gems (dependencies). For more information, check out https://jekyllrb.com/docs/ruby-101/. If there are no errors, we can test this repo locally by running bundle exec jekyll serve and navigating to the site shown afterwards (usually something like http://localhost:4000/portfolio.
I have happened to come across an error during the installation: the gem 'http_parser.rb' failed to install its version 0.6.0. This is a problem of that version, and installing a higher version (e.g. bundle install http_parser.rb --version 0.6.1) should suffice.
While I have more or less achieved the aesthetic I was looking for when I started this project, in hindsight it might have been a better idea building everything from scratch rather than downloading a template to mess around with it. Yes, it saved me a lot of time regarding sidebar, header, footer, directory structure, etc. But I have spent quite a lot of time getting to know it too. My fighting with CSS has taken more time than what I'm willing to admit.