Building This Website

This website is built using the following 3 core components:

1. Jekyll - a Ruby-based static site generator

2. GitHub Pages - free site hosted from GitHub

3. Google Domains - domain name hosting by Google

Rather than re-invent the wheel and describe every step of the website generation and hosting process, below will be a collection of links to tutorials that provide the step-by-step instructions anyone can use to create a static website similar to this one.

Step 1: Establishing a GitHub Pages site

GitHub allows each user to create one “user site” and unlimited “repository sites”, see their documentation for more information. So the first thing to do is create a GitHub repository called <username>.github.io which is where your website code will go.

Note, building a website this way means that the source code behind your website will be publicly available! For this reason, no confidential or private information should be added your source code. But, this also means the source code for this website is available for you to use as a starting point or for reference when building your own website. In fact, this idea of building off of and adapting existing code to fit your own needs is common-practice in the open source world. This website used the source code behind this other website as a jumping off point.

Step 2: Using Jekyll

There are a set of instructions provided by GitHub which provide details about their support for Jekyll site integration. They provide information about how to configure your code repository, how to enable website hosting, as well as instructions and links for getting Jekyll setup on your local machine.

Once that is configured, you’ll want to actually use Jekyll to define and populate your website. Jekyll sites come in a variety of different layouts called “themes”. For reference, this website uses the lovely Minimal Mistakes theme.

Step 3: Custom Domain Hosting via Google Domains

If you’ve hosted your website materials via GitHub Pages using Jekyll, then you can stop at this point and you should have a website at <username>.github.io. However if you want to host your website at a custom domain name, such as jayaramhariharan.com or yourname.com, you need to purchase the domain name. Google, via Google Domains, is one of many companies that offer domain registration services.

Once you’ve purchased a domain name, you simply need to tell GitHub Pages that you would like to redirect your hosted website to a custom domain name. Fortunately, GitHub makes this simple and even provides documentation detailing how to do this.

On the other end, you will need to tell Google Domains where the hosted website material is. The GitHub documentation provides some information on how to do this, but I also found this guide to be very helpful.

That’s it! Now you should have a website that can be accessed via the original GitHub Pages address (e.g. elbeejay.github.io for this website) and/or your custom domain name (e.g. jayaramhariharan.com).