I was very excited to write blogs about my experiences, about new things that I learned recently, summaries of my tech-social findings I explored. I was googling about free blog hosting services available today and I didn’t found any difficulty to reach GitHub Pages. I found it very easy and very simple to write and publish our content online without worrying about maintenance and security.

This is my first ever blog I am writing, more or less this is not a blog but mentions about tutorials, blogs, support pages that I followed to get started with blog writing.

Website

GitHub pages gives us opportunity to host our own website publicly free of cost. This is very exciting for me as I don’t have to maintain any server or host site to any other cloud services. With simple 3-4 steps explained on above mentioned link took me to my own website.

Jekyll

GitHub Pages supports Jekyll- Static Site Generator in Ruby. We can use Jekyll editor and write our blogs. As our blog-source is going to be on GitHub, we can clone whole repository locally and make changes to our blogs, check those changes, verify and push it to GitHub to make it live.

Setting Up GitHub Repo

To go online with our website and blog posts we need to create spacial repository on GitHub with our account, let it be free account. GitHub Pages explaining it very well for setting Hello World website. But for customizing and making it responsive, showing blogs we need to modify it. And don’t worry, this too is very easy. Just fork one of the many sample GitHub repositories and put our own content into it.
Here is one of such tutorial which explains this in very detail. This is really very good starting point.

Markdown

As mentioned before, we can write our content with Jekyll editor, we can go even with more simplicity. As I wanted to write my blogs with very simple formatting and without involving complex editors and programming languages I choose to go with GitHub online markdown editor. GitHub’s online markdown editor is sufficient to write simply formatted blogs. Once we done writing blog content in this editor, after saving changes to GitHub our blog goes live automatically.
Here is great explanation I found about writing and formatting with markdown. Also go through this markdown cheatsheet for more info.
Be careful with spelling mistakes while editing with GitHub online editor.

Enhancing Blogs

Once we have finished writing our blog and published it with the help of above mentioned tutorials and posts, we can enhance it by adding comment section to get feedback and suggestions from our readers. Also we need to make our blog available on Google Search by searching specific keywords. And guess what, this too is very easy.
Follow this Computing Thoughts blog to achieve these following features:
Google Search Indexing
Comment Section

I hope someone will find this helpful. Start writing your blogs and host them on your own site, good luck!

(Please don’t forget to leave your feedbacks, suggestions in comments below)