How I Built This Site

This is a Jekyll site hosted on GitHub pages. The code repository is public, so it’s free forever (or, presumably for the life of GitHub). I tried a few alternatives before landing on the Jekyll tech stack with the Chirpy theme.

I wanted something simple, clean, and easy. Cotes Chung has built a solid Jekyll theme with great features that meet my needs. The getting started instructions are easy to follow and I had a site running locally pretty quickly. Using GitHub Pages to host the site was an easy choice. There is no cost as long as you keep the code repo public. :)

The comments utilize GitHub discussions via the giscuss app.

Wagtail seemed like a solid choice as a platform as well…but it runs on Django…making it incompatible with GitHub pages. It’s also more complex than what I needed and I’m super happy with this style and layout. If you’re looking to build out a content management system with multiple people contributing, Wagtail might be the way to go. Django is easy to install and setup, but you do need to find a place to host it.