Create a simple blog! - From Bits to Being

For a lot of tech enthusiasts, creating their first public page is a big achievement. A sense of accomplishment that something is now public and can be seen by anyone. You can share it with your friends and have some fun (even brag a bit about it). So as i developed today this blog i think it would be a great opportunity to share how i started this blog. 🔥

First of all I didn’t want or need anything fancy. A simple page that i would be able to write about my hobbies, my projects and generally my interests. Furthermore I didn’t want to pay for anything or work a lot on it. I frist thought on using my raspberry pi as a server for my blog. It sounded like a good idea to learn a bit more about hosting websites. Truth be told, wheni started reading about port forwarding, some PTSD started kicking in from my attempt to forward a port from my vpn in order to use it for a qbittorent project (more on that later). So I asked ChatGPT what would be an easier solution, and that’s when it suggested using Jekyll with GitHub pages. I had some experience with GitHub pages, but I didn’t know that I could host one page per project, which sounded pretty awesome and easy for me. I started checking on Jekyll and it seemed pretty straight forward. I also searched for some templates and voila! it was time to start working on my blog. So, let’s get first things first

Step 1: Prerequisites

Based on the Jekyll documentation, You will need 3 things

Ruby version 2.7.0 or higher
RubyGems
GCC and Make

For Ubuntu you can check Jekyll documentation. You need to run

sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential zlib1g-dev

Then for RubyGems

echo '# Install Ruby Gems to ~/gems' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GEM_HOME="$HOME/gems"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

and finally

gem install jekyll bundler

Note: For me the final command didn’t work (the eror was It is likely that you need to grant write permissions for that path.). You can try to fix permissions inside your project’s folder (will talk about how to create one) by using

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER .

and then bundle install.

But if this doesn’t work you could do sudo bundle install but it is not recommended.

Step 2: Create your file’s project

This is a straight forward step. To make a jekyll project you run

jekyll new <YOUR_BLOG_NAME>
cd <YOUR_BLOG_NAME>
bundle exec jekyll serve

This will run your site on http://localhost:4000

Step 3: Themes!

Without some sazzle and dazzle, the blog seems pretty boring. Let’s change that! You can check different themes on jekyllthemes.io. Some are free some are paid. I chose this clean blog theme. You can find the installation guide on the theme’s page but I name the steps. So, in order to apply it to your jekyll blog you need to:

Replace the current theme in your Gemfile with gem “jekyll-theme-clean-blog”. Go to Gemfile and fing the ‘gem “minima”, “~> 2.5” ‘ attribute. Change this.
Install the theme (run the command inside your site directory): bundle install
Replace the current theme in your _config.yml file with theme: jekyll-theme-clean-blog. theme: jekyll-theme-clean-blog
Build your site: bundle exec jekyll serve

Now you need to check if there are certain files on your root folder.

index.html
about.html
contact.html
posts/index.html

I would suggest checking the documentation’s demo page on how to populate them. For example on posts/index.html you can put something like

    

<article class="post-preview">
  <a href="/blog/2025/08/13/beaver.html">
    <h2 class="post-title">Beaver</h2>
    
    <h3 class="post-subtitle">A textual domain language for machine learning applications on data streams</h3>
    
  </a>
  <p class="post-meta">
    Posted by  Jason Kakandris  on August 13, 2025 &middot; <span class="reading-time" title="Estimated read time">
  
   16 mins  read </span>

  </p>
</article>

<hr />



<article class="post-preview">
  <a href="/blog/2025/06/27/thesis-tools-copy.html">
    <h2 class="post-title">Thesis tools 101</h2>
    
    <h3 class="post-subtitle">The Tools That Helped Me Survive My Thesis</h3>
    
  </a>
  <p class="post-meta">
    Posted by  Jason Kakandris  on June 27, 2025 &middot; <span class="reading-time" title="Estimated read time">
  
   19 mins  read </span>

  </p>
</article>

<hr />



<article class="post-preview">
  <a href="/blog/2025/06/14/media-stack.html">
    <h2 class="post-title">Self hosted media stack</h2>
    
    <h3 class="post-subtitle">Start hosting your own Netflix.</h3>
    
  </a>
  <p class="post-meta">
    Posted by  Jason Kakandris  on June 14, 2025 &middot; <span class="reading-time" title="Estimated read time">
  
   19 mins  read </span>

  </p>
</article>

<hr />



<article class="post-preview">
  <a href="/blog/2025/06/06/create-blog.html">
    <h2 class="post-title">Create a simple blog!</h2>
    
    <h3 class="post-subtitle">A guide to a simple blog page.</h3>
    
  </a>
  <p class="post-meta">
    Posted by  Jason Kakandris  on June 06, 2025 &middot; <span class="reading-time" title="Estimated read time">
  
   7 mins  read </span>

  </p>
</article>

<hr />

Note Jekyll supports Liquid template tags so to use the same template for every post you can wrap the previous code around {% for post in site.posts %} {% endfor %}

You also need to configure your baseurl url email author title and description on your _config.yml file. When you do so on your terminal press Ctr+C and then bundle exec jekyll serve

Note I couldn’t make the contact page work so I am thinking of deleting it in the future since it is not important.

Step 4: Publish

In order to publish your page for free you need to upload your project to github. The easiset way to do so it to use VsCode.

Open your project in VsCode
Go to Source Control (3rd icon on the left)
Press initialize repository
Then write a commit message and press Commit
Choose public repo when prompted to select
Go to your github profile
Press Repositories
Choose your repo
Go to settings
Pages
Build and Deployment –> Chooose GitHub actions
Branch main
Press actions on the top left
Search for jekyll
Press configure on jekyll

Finito! Your blog will be published on https://<your-github-name>.github.io/blog Now you can add new posts, modify your pages and whenever you push to your main branch it will update your blog.

Hope this tutorial helps you create your first blog 😊

Sources

Below I summarize all my sources