The Idea

The thought of building my personal website has long been at the back of my mind. I first learnt it was possible to do so in sixth grade. Prior to that I believed only big corporations like Google or Microsoft could build and deploy websites. I registered my very first domain soon after and deployed a simple html site that only contained my name and a couple of old nineties style wordart. It was fun building it! But soon after I realized I would have to learn css and jquery if I was to build any semblance of a decent website.
To a sixth grader those first few lines of code were highly intimidating. Without a mentor to guide me (and this was pre-YouTube era) I simply gave up. The domain expired soon after and I never gave it another shot.
It was in college I started coding again and I reregistered the domain. I then built a barebones portfolio site with broken links and a copy pasted theme. I guess I never liked the idea of tinkering with css and styling everything manually(Little did I know about the existence of SASS!). I again gave up.
TL;DR This is my third attempt. Imagine my surprise when I came across awesome tools like Jekyll and some very nice people who have already setup ready to deploy sites that you can fork on GitHub, and lo and behold my site is ready and delpoyed within the hour, with only some minor editing. It even has a custom domain! It took me longer to write this post than it did for me to fork, setup, and deploy my website!

The Execution

Follow the instructions as given here. You just need to fork this repo, rename it to your-username.github.io and edit the template. Yep that’s it! Your site will be deployed at http://your-username.github.io/ . If you want to add your custom domain, then point your domain to Github’s address, instructions here.

Conclusion

It has become very easy to setup websites, and with tools like Squarespace you don’t even need to know coding to build a professional looking websites. Automation will make building products and businesses as simple as a few clicks in near future hopefully, with your imagination being the only limit. I hope you’re doing great, and see you in the next blog post!