Some people at Hacker School were asking for advice / directions for how to set up a blog. So here are some directions for a simple possible way!

There are lots of ways to set up a blog. This way will let you write posts with Markdown, version them with Git, publish them with git push origin gh-pages, and, most importantly, think for exactly 0 seconds about what your site should look like. You’ll need a working Ruby environment which is the hardest part. I use rbenv to manage my Ruby. I have spent months being confused about how to make Ruby work, so If you also need to set up Ruby it will take more than 5 minutes and this will be a total lie.

But! If you do, there is no excuse for you to not have a blog within 5 minutes (or at least not more than an hour). It took me 40 minutes but that was because I was also writing this blog post.

I used to worry a lot about what my website looked like, and then I realized if I wrote interesting blog posts basically nobody cared!

All of my internal monologues about whether I should make it orange or not were for nothing. (the answer to orange is always yes, though). Lots of people subscribe with RSS anyway and never look at this site in the first place :) (I eventually commissioned my awesome friend Lea to redesign this site and now I think it looks awesome).

So if you have something to say, even if it is only one blog post’s worth of things, you can totally set up a site! Let’s start.

We’ll be using

• Jekyll, a static site generator
• Octopress to create a skeleton site without having to think about what it should look like
• GitHub pages to host our site

Step 1: Install Octopress:

$ gem install octopress --pre
$ rbenv rehash

Step 2: Create a GitHub repo

You’ll need a place to put your blog! I made a new repository at https://github.com/jvns/fake-website. If you want your blog to appear at your-username.github.io, call this repo your-username.github.io. GitHub has some more instructions here and here.

If you want your blog to be on a custom non-GitHub domain that you own, there are directions about how to set up a custom domain.

Step 3: Create a skeleton site

Now we can make a website!

octopress new fake-website
cd fake-website
jekyll serve

This will create a new skeleton of an Octopress blog, and serve it to you on http://localhost:4000, where you can tinker to your heart’s content. Not too much! Remember, you only have 5 minutes.

Step 4: Push your website to GitHub

Now that we’ve maybe tinkered a bit, we’re ready for the world to see our (empty) website! If you put a Jekyll site in the gh-pages branch of a GitHub repository, GitHub will build it and serve it for you.

From inside fake-website, I did:

git init
git add .
git commit -m"My awesome blog"
git remote add origin git@github.com:jvns/fake-website
git checkout -b gh-pages
git push -u origin gh-pages

Step 5: Edit _config.yml

When I do this, I have a website magically generated at http://jvns.github.io/fake-website. But it looks totally broken! You need to make one more change: edit _config.yml to change the base URL of your website. Here’s my commit to fix it. 20

Step 6: Go blog (takes more than 5 minutes oops)

At this point you have probably discovered that if anyone on the internet tells you something takes 5 minutes they are definitely lying. But maybe you have succeeded anyway.

You can create new blog posts with octopress new post "My Awesome Post". I’m excited to see what you write!