Creating a Personal Website Using GitHub Pages

Published 2016 August 2

The GitHub mascot is known as an 'octocat' — a cross between two very intelligent animals. I drew the one above for you, dear reader.

Summary: A brief overview of Git and GitHub followed by pointers to instructions on creating your own personal website hosted at yourusername.github.io for free.

Git & GitHub

Git is software for version control of files to help a person or a group of people do, publish and keep track of their work.¹ One of the best things about Git is that it is free, open source software. This means that it will always be available regardless of whether a company still exists.

GitHub is a website that provides a good user interface for Git software. It is used by companies like Google — https://github.com/google — Facebook — https://github.com/facebook — and Apple — https://github.com/apple. One of the people² who created GitHub wrote a parable that helps us see how it works. One of, if not the best, thing about GitHub is it makes it easy for anybody to use Git!

You can easily create a website for free using GitHub and work on it alone or with other people (who have your permission), and publish it on yourusername.github.io or download it to your own computer or transfer it to other servers for editing, publishing or backup.³

Publishing Your Website With GitHub for Free

1. Go to https://github.com/join and create an account. Make note of the username you choose.
2. Follow the instructions here: https://guides.github.com/features/pages/ — once you are finished, your website will be visible at yourusername.github.io

Coming up next (you can sign up to my mailing list to receive posts by mail):

• Adding more pages to your site.
• Changing the look of your site.
• Working on your own computer and synchronizing your work with your GitHub repository which then updates your website automatically.
• Registering your own customdomainname.com and pointing it to your GitHub pages site.