Making an independent website
This is what to do if you just want a website. (This page is a bit long, but it’s really not that much work.)
First things
Start by cloning the repository for the present site. (Or, alternatively, fork it and then clone your own version.)
git clone git://github.com/kbroman/simple_site
Then change the name of that directory to something meaningful.
mv simple_site something_meaningful
(Of course, don’t use something_meaningful
but rather
something meaningful.)
Now change into that directory and remove the .git
directory
(because you don’t want the history of my repository).
cd something_meaningful
rm -r .git
Now make it a git repository again.
git init
Things not to change
You’ll need to keep the following files and directories largely unchanged.
Rakefile
_includes
_layouts
_plugins
assets/themes
We will change one file within _includes/
; see below.
Edit the _config.yml
file
The
_config.yml
file contains a bunch of configuration information. You’ll want to
edit this file to replace my information with your information.
Perhaps edit the
line with exclude:
if you’ve named License.md
and/or ReadMe.md
differently. (I’ve
edited this line a bit, here.)
exclude: [..., "ReadMe.md", "Rakefile", "License.md"]
Edit the lines about the site name and author.
title : simple site
author :
name : Karl Broman
email : [email protected]
github : kbroman
feedburner : nil
Edit the
production_url
line
by replacing kbroman
with your github user name, and replace
simple_site
with the name that your repository will have on github
(something_meaningful
?).
production_url : https://kbroman.github.io/simple_site
Note that the https
(vs http
) is important here; see
“Securing your github pages site with https.”
(I need to use http
because my site uses the custom domain
kbroman.org
, but you likely need https
.)
Replace the
BASE_PATH
line
with the same url.
BASE_PATH : https://kbroman.github.io/simple_site
There’s also an
ASSET_PATH
line,
but you can leave that commented-out (with the #
symbol at the beginning).
Note that for the BASE_PATH
, I actually have
https://kbroman.org/
in place of https://kbroman.github.io/
. I set up
a
custom domain,
which involved a series of emails with a DNS provider. I
don’t totally understand how it works, and I’m not entirely sure
that I’ve done it right. But if you want to have a custom domain, take
a look at
that GitHub help page.
Edit _includes/themes/twitter/default.html
The
_includes/themes/twitter/default.html
file defines how a basic page will look on your site. In particular,
it contains a bit of html code for a footer, if you want one.
Find the footer for my site and remove it or edit it to suit. This is the only bit of html you’ll have to deal with.
<!-- start of Karl's footer; modify this part -->
<a href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"> ...
<a href="https://kbroman.org">Karl Broman</a>
<!-- end of Karl's footer; modify this part -->
Edit or remove the Markdown files
Edit the
index.md
file, which will become the main page for your site.
First, edit the initial chunk with a different title and tagline. Feel free to just delete the tagline.
---
layout: page
title: simple site
tagline: Easy websites with GitHub Pages
---
Now edit the rest (or, for now, just remove) the rest of the file.
Now go into the pages/
directory and remove or rename and modify
all of the Markdown files in there
Note that when you link to any of these Markdown-based pages, you’ll
want to use a .html
extension rather than .md
. For example, look
at the
main page
for this site; the links in the bullet points for the various pages
look like this:
- [Overview](pages/overview.html)
- [Making an independent website](pages/independent_site.html)
- [Making a personal site](pages/user_site.html)
- [Making a site for a project](pages/project_site.html)
- [Making a jekyll-free site](pages/nojekyll.html)
- [Testing your site locally](pages/local_test.html)
- [Resources](pages/resources.html)
Commit all of these changes.
At the start, we’d removed the .git/
subdirectory (with the history
of my repository) and then used git init
to make it a new git
repository.
Now you want to add and commit all of the files, as modified.
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
Then change the name of the master branch to gh-pages
.
git branch -m master gh-pages
Push everything to GitHub
Now go back to GitHub and create a new repository, called something
meaningful. (I’ll again pretend that it’s explicitly
something_meaningful
.)
Then go back to the command line and push your repository to GitHub.
git remote add origin [email protected]:username/something_meaningful
Replace username
with your GitHub user name and
something_meaningful
with the name of your repository. And you might
want to use the https://
construction instead, if you’re not using ssh.
git remote add origin https://github.com/username/something_meaningful
Finally, push everything to GitHub.
git push -u origin gh-pages
Note that we’re using gh-pages
and not master
here, as we want
this stuff in a gh-pages
branch.
Check whether it worked
Go to https://username.github.io/something_meaningful
and cross your
fingers that it worked. (Really, I should be crossing my fingers.)
Up next
Now go to making a personal site.