I finally got around to setup a blog. Not the easiest thing in the world. My only requirement: it had to support Markdown for editing. And it needed to be easy to maintain I am not an administrator at heart.

Which platform?

I checked out Ghost first. It seemed really nice and easy. But I wasn’t ready to pay for it. Never know when my latest fad will die off.

Then I met Jekyll. And learned you could host this maintenance free blogging platform on Github Pages. Which I didn’t know existed! And this is all free to boot!

Getting started with Jekyll

If only I could find a nice tutorial showing how to set all of things together easily so I finally could start to write. And then I found this post. Honestly tutorial as good as this one are not always available when you need them.

Theme

I wasn’t satisfied with the default theming. Then I found that if you host your blog on Github pages you have access to a very limited set of themes. I think I picked up the less ugly. Slate theme for the win.

Tags support: steal from the best

Now if only I could find a way to tag my posts and to display a nice tag view. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the box. Except when you can “borrow” from somebody else. I found this nice blog post. Let me rephrase this: I find this whole blog and I used the tag view stuff and the post aggregate view and called it a day.

The cons

The only thing I am not totally satisfied with Jekyll: it seems it doesn’t work on Windows. Or that it needs a crazy complicated setup. I guess it will be a good enough reason to get a new Mac!