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GitHub Pages Bucket List Item - Done!

Hello World!

I have had a developer bucket list item: use GitHub pages to host a blog, and have the maintenance not suck. The main thing that has always made this project a non starter has been Jekyll. First off I don't use much Ruby, so my system is often not optimized for it. It also feels strange to use Ruby when their are so many great JS options available to keep this project FullStack JS.

I decided to use Ghost which is an open source JavaScript based blog platform. The result is what you see now!

This is just the beginning... Check an item off of my Todo list:

[ ] Create a Blog using GitHub pages.

This project ended up being fairly easy to accomplish. I used most of the notes from Paladini's repository to setup Ghost, and used Buster to convert the content to static pages for GitHub Pages.

I decided to create a root project folder and put two child folders inside:

  • ghost
  • static

Then I initialized a git repository in each folder. The ghost repository would be private, and the static repository needs to be made public when deploying to GitHub. Set the static repository files to use the master branch for gh-pages on GitHub. And Voila!

Since I decided to modify the folder structure I also modified the update.sh script to change directory into each folder, commit the updates, and push changes to each repo.

If you plan to tackle this project here are a few tips:

  1. Add a domain name. I was disappointed that initially my site was only available at: http://michaelerobertsjr.github.io/michaelerobertsjr/ not what I expected based on the docs. I registered a name to clean things up a bit.

  2. Update the config.js in Ghost to reflect your domain name once you have it setup.

  3. You must run Ghost when you want to publish the site. Buster will need to crawl the your site locally to create the static files.

  4. Make sure you use npm start --production when you run Ghost so that it will use the correct base url in the static files that are generated by buster.

  5. Enjoy and stay tuned for more content.