Setting up Jekyll with Bootstrap, Github pages and a custom domain

Update: August 2019

I’ve replaced the original Jekyll site with this site powered by Hugo and TailwindCSS.

Update: July 2017

I simplified everything. Replaced Bootstrap with Basscss and removed everything I wasn’t really using: tags, search, and all Javascript.

The easy path

After heading down a few different paths, cloning a working site worked best. Now I’m ready to customize a good-looking, working setup.

All initial thanks are due to Garry Welding who has an great blog post about setting up Jekyll on GitHub Pages with Bootstrap

Prior to finding Gary’s solution I went down a number of promising paths. All of which probably would be great, except that it was much faster to copy someone else’s working Jekyll Github blog.

What worked for me

• cloning Garry’s blog, removing all content and customizing the style some
• alias generator for Jekyll to have links like photos just work
• tags generator to add tags to blog posts
• tagbuild.sh by copyninja to copy tags so Github shows them correctly, which I also modified to have it do even more
• instafeed.js to add a photos page and sidebar with recent Instagram photos

What didn’t work for me

But could be a good resource for someone starting out:

• Jekyll Bootstrap
• Yes We Jekyll
• Foundation instead of Bootstrap
• Octopress