Last week the Homebound tech team had its very first hack day, so I decided to work on setting up a tech blog. What better way to kick off the blog than with a meta post about the setup?

GitHub Pages

We are running GitHub Pages with Jekyll for this blog. There were a few other options such as Medium and various JAM-stack setups, but we liked GitHub Pages for a few reasons:

• GitHub hosts the site, so we don't have to run any extra infrastructure.
• GitHub Pages supports Jekyll "out of the box," so we don't have to mess around with a build pipeline. It also supports the plugins we care about, e.g. syntax highlighting.
• Jekyll is a known quantity at this point, and works just fine for our blogging purposes. markdown allows us to just concentrate on writing, but if we want to do something fancier (like embed a d3 visualization) then we can always drop to html.

Setup

The initial setup was fairly simple, and we mostly followed the official instructions provided by GitHub. The only wrinkle was the installation of Ruby, which took a bit of finagling due to a bug on modern Mac laptops that have an antivirus installed.

It's worth noting that setting up Ruby, Bundler, and Jekyll is only necessary for running a local preview. For day-to-day text-heavy posts, it's possible to just draw up the markdown file, push, and let GitHub's build do all the heavy lifting.

Future Work

Although the blog is young, we already have some ideas for future work:

• improvements on the site layout
• improvements on overall styling
• comments using e.g. disqus

But for now we have the essentials, so let the blogging begin!