Hackathon: Geek blogging with Jekyll and GitHub Pages

Blogging is useful and fun! Writing things down helps you organize your thoughts, connect to other people, and receive criticism of your ideas. Setting up and maintaining a blog isn't fun, however. It's tedious. Unless you can use the tools and workflow you already know as a programmer.

Jekyll (http://jekyllrb.com/) is a simple static website and blog generator that is very popular with programmers. It allows you to create content in your favorite text editor, in simpler formats like Markdown, and provides write-once configuration options for tags, permalinks, pagination, and other stuff.

GitHub (https://github.com/) uses Jekyll for GitHub Pages (http://pages.github.com/): a website hosting platform. While originally intended for project pages, people now use it for their personal blogs. Publishing is done via git push, so you have very tight control of your content and can apply all the benefits of version control. And if you don't have Git at hand, you can always edit online, right on GitHub.

At this hackathon we're going to create and customize a unique blog without a single line of server-side code, then deploy it to GitHub servers. It's possible to work alone or in pairs.

Prerequisites:

basic familiarity with Git a working Git installation (http://git-scm.com/) a GitHub account (https://github.com/) competence in HTML and CSS