I've finally decided to set up a decent personal page. I have settled for github-pages because I like the idea of keeping my site in a repository and having someone else host and deploy it for me. The site will be really simple, mostly static files. Thanks to Github, Jekyll will automatically generate static pages for my posts every time I commit anything new to this repository.

But Jekyll can be used independently, so if I ever choose to host the site myself, I can do it quite easily. Another thing that I liked about this approach is that the generated html files can be used in the future, and I will not need Jekyll to serve it. Jekyll is really simple and most of the things are written in plain html. That means that everything could be easily reused if I ever choose to change to another blogging framework (e.g. pelical). But, for the time being, I like the fact that Github takes care of the compilation as well, so I can simply modify or add files through the web interface should I need to.

I hadn't played with HTML and CSS for a while now, so I also wanted to use this site as a playground. At some point, I realised I was doing mostly everything in plain HTML and CSS, and decided to keep it like that for as long as possible. As of this writing, I haven't included any Javascript code in the page. Probably I will use some to add my gists and repositories, but we will see about that.

I think the code speaks for itself, so you can check out my repository on Github. You can clone and deploy it easily like this:

git clone
https://github.com/balkian/balkian.github.com cd balkian.github.com
jekyll serve -w

I will keep updating this post with information about:

• Some Jekyll plugins that might be useful
• What CSS tricks I learnt
• The webfonts I used
• The badge on the left side of the page