I had been writing on Medium and Tumblr in the past but had always wanted to switch to a static website which I could have more control / ownership. That day has come! This post is an explanation of the new setup.
I used mediumexporter to export my recent posts from Medium and tumblr2markdown to export the rest of the posts from Tumblr. I now had a directory of markdown files.
GitHub pages is a neat way to set up a static website. It uses Jekyll and renders markdown files without needing any extra configuration.
I wanted urls to look like arpith.co/new-blog-setup but also wanted my posts to sit in a separate directory in the repository. To do this I used this _config.yml, changing the “mypages” path to “posts”. This let me drop “posts” from the urls.
defaults:
-
scope:
path: "posts"
type: "pages"
values:
permalink: "/:basename"
My homepage is just a list of posts. This is a throwback to my undergrad days (before I switched to Tumblr). The post list is generated with the following Liquid code. I’m using pages instead of posts because I don’t want to keep timestamps in my filenames. This means I need to sort site.pages by date and reverse it.
{% assign posts = site.pages | sort: 'date' | reverse %}
{% for post in posts %}
- [{{post.title}}]({{post.url}}){% endfor %}
I’m using index.md for the index page and README.md for the repository readme.
assets/css/style.css is where the style sheet lives and _layouts contains the templates.
Finally, I set up my domain name to point to GitHub pages’ addresses, and added the domain name in the repository’s settings page. This created a file in the repository called CNAME which contains the domain name.
And that’s it! I’m pretty happy with the result!
Thanks to Alicja Raszkowska and Lindsey Kuper!