I want to create a personal web and blogging site. As a GitHub user the idea of a GitHub hosted web-site is attractive to me. GitHub provide one static personal web-site per user - and its free. Also you get a cool personalized web-site url - in my case the url is patclaffey.github.io

GitHub provide very clear instructions for setting up a personal web-site. Just follow GitHub's instructions - its as easy as falling off a log. To summarize - logon to your GitHub account, create a new repository there, name this new repository using the naming convention username.github.io - in my case patclaffey.github.io. That's it - you now have a new GitHub hosted web-site.

How to Test the Web-Site

Clone the web-site to your local machine - this is familiar work-flow for a GitHub user. Navigate to the root directory of the web-site repository and create the site index file by issuing the following command:

echo "Hello World" > index.html

Push these changes to GitHub. The contents this site index file should get displayed on a browser at my personal GitHub web-site url.

I opened my browser at my personal url patclaffey.github.io - and success, "Hello World" is displayed in the browser.

How does a GitHub Web-Site Work?

GitHub call their web-site technology GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages use the tool called Jekyll to read the user's repository content and generate the web-site on the internet. Jekyll is the key technology used by GitHub Pages to generate the user web-site.

Conclusion

For a GitHub user creating a GitHub web-site is very easy. However a web-site that only displays "Hello World" cannot be termed a functional web-site. More software must be installed and configured before we can start blogging. According to GitHub the next step is to install Jekyll on the local Desktop.