My blog : A static website

I’m going to explain how the website you’re currently on was created.

I wanted to have a place where I could write about my projects and keep track of them. Even though I’ve created several websites in the past, this one was incredibly simple: all I needed was a blog, or some static pages for my new posts, and a way to navigate them.

That’s why I chose Jekyll to create the website and Github Pages to host it. I was familiar with these tools from a previous job where I built another site using the same technologies.

Jekyll : A static site generator

There are many similar tools available now, but I continue to use Jekyll due to its simplicity and support. Jekyll is an open-source static site generator written in Ruby. It renders Markdown and Liquid templates and generates a complete static website that can be served by any web server.

That means I can quickly add new content by simply creating a new Mardown text file.

Jekyll

Read more about Jekyll on the official website : https://jekyllrb.com/.

Github Pages : A free hosting service

GitHub Pages offers free hosting of a Jekyll website in one of your repositories. The website is then published and can be found at username.github.io or under your own domain name.

As you’ve probably noticed, I went with the latter option because I already own the beniserv.fr domain for my home server and other services.

Github Pages

Read more about Github Pages on the official website : https://pages.github.com/.

Chirpy : A stunning Jekyll theme

I could have built the site from scratch, but I’m not a good designer, and it would have taken months of effort. I didn’t want to spend so much time creating an average-looking blog.

So I began looking for an existing theme and fell in love with the Chirpy theme by Cotes Chung. It was exactly what I needed and expected. It had the majority of the functionalities needed for a good blog (and even more): posts, tags, categories, a search function, an archive, etc.

And because the theme is so well-designed, it only takes a few minutes to get started.

Read more about the Chirpy theme on its repository : https://github.com/cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy.

Multi-language : Implementing Polyglot

The only issue I had with this theme was a lack of multilingual support.

It is essential for me to be able to write posts in both English and French. And I wanted to make it easy for the reader to switch between the two languages.

Hopefully, there is a Jekyll plugin called Polyglot. So I integrated it into my site after making some theme changes and adding a language selector to the side menu.

Read more about the Chirpy theme on its repository : https://github.com/untra/polyglot.

Eventually, I would clean up my code, and create a Pull Request to the Chirpy theme with my changes, as I’m sure multi-language support could be interesting.

The source code of the website is available in one of my repository on Github : https://github.com/Fantomos/blog.