Finally, a personal website –– the Why and How!

March 2, 2021

My thoughts on why I chose to build a personal website using Jekyll (a static site generator and templating tool), Markdown (to author content), and GitHub pages for hosting.

Why a personal website?

Have you wondered about building a personal website? Or why you would need one? Perhaps to showcase your work. Publish content. Build trust. Be searchable. Share information with potential clients or recruiters. Connect with others (who can find you through your website) anywhere in the world. Simply to have a digital presence and brand.

For a while I have wanted to create a personal website to communicate my story: who am I, what do I do (data science), what’s my professional experience, my resume, samples of my work, maybe blog posts, and my interests outside of work.

But with just some introductory web development class I had taken years ago (which made everything seem quite intimidating and code intensive), I just never have attempted to build one.

Why now?

A few weeks ago, while looking up something related to GitHub and Ruby (which I knew nothing about), I stumbled upon some blogs talking about the simplicity and attractiveness of using a static site generator for hosting a personal site (for free!) on GitHub pages. Everthing I read checked my requirements for simplicity:

• use of open source components GitHub Pages, Ruby, Jekyll
• content first with the option to author in Markdown (which I am familiar with because I use it a lot when I work with R)
• very basic knowledge of HTML and CSS needed (I could learn as much as I wanted, if I wanted, as I went along)
• free hosting on GitHub Pages (I wanted to learn about GitHub Pages anyway)
• easy and quick to update content

What does it involve?

I was mostly convinced and I decided to give it a go. My to do list looked something like:

• Understand GitHub Pages
• Install Ruby and Jekyll (I had never worked with these before)
• Understand themes in Jekyll (This was a little challenging at first; but a theme is basically a set of files that together provide a website. You separately provide the content for the website and use the theme to build a website that looks and acts in a certain way, which can be further customized to your liking).
• Select and install a theme (I chose the really cool and well documented Minimal Mistakes theme by Michael Rose)
• Create content and learn how to organize it with the Minimal Mistakes theme structure
• Build and develop the site locally
• Push the site to GitHub and host it on GitHub Pages

Read On

While I didn’t get through the process as quickly as others described, I eventually figured out the various pieces and enjoyed learning new things along the way. At times I was ready to smash my computer getting simple things to work, which took a long time to research online, but I am glad I kept at it.

I’ve enjoyed creating this website as it’s taught me a lot. I do not have any web development experience, and am no expert on the topic or the path I took to stand up this site. I am sure I have done some things the long way around or are simply incorrect. But I’d like to share my experience in building this site, precisely to help others benefit if they are in a similar situation.

Feel free to leave me comments if I have misstated anything or even just feedback.

Happy reading!

Read Next: Personal Website – Part 1: What’s a static site generator and what to do with it?