Building the Blog (01): Start from Here

Finally, it started ... ...

I have been plannning to have a blog of mine for a long time. However, owing to all kinds of different problems, this work still stay in the status of UNDERCONSINDERATION. Last year, I started to implement one in PHP by doing everything required by a blog-like site. However, though that one had been coded for about two weeks including the process of web page design, finally I was interrupted by an important person who had helped me a lot and asked me for assist. Form then on, my project of a self-blog site have no progress.

From this post, I decided to finally (really, it\’s true) start my blog and the first series of blog posts is the building process log of the blog itself. That is to do blog while to build the blog.

Before this turly start of blog buliding (I hope so, indeed.) , I have searched, experienced, tested, evaluated or designed some kinds of blog system or blog site management. And eventually, considering the convenience, accessibility, limitation of all the possible solution, I decided to use Jekyll as blog engine, and plan to host it on GitHub.

Jekyll blog engine can gengerate totally static web pages that only need some basic resource provided by the server, which means less configure on server application and less efforts on remote application deployment and management. Besides, Jekyll\’s design of site management is more depend on some simple convensions between the blogger and the engine instead of applying redundent restraint to blogger to ensuer the proper fuctionality of the program. As a result, there is nearly full control of me to set the template, adding scriptand styles, etc.

To use Jekyll from scartch, some basic skills are surely required. I pick some of the requirement I perseve.

• markdown syntax (quite easy to learn)
• front end skills
• linux operate
• git and GitHub (if you want to host the blog on GitHub)
• ...

Though it is possible to run all of the things on Windows, I personally still highly recommend everyone who want to build a Jekyll site use Linux as their work environment.

If you don\’t konwn all of the things, there are still some existing template site for you to start your Jekyll blog.

Then, let\’t dive into the world of Jekyll.

In the following posts, I will start form environment installing and site structure constructing, which will be the basic of this site.