how I created my blog using Lanyon, Poole and Jekyll

In my first blog post, I’ll explain how I created my blog. I don’t have any knowledge of building web sites and somehow I thought it will be difficult. However, after lots of ‘googling’, I finally managed it.

I use the Lanyon theme of the Poole sliding sidebar theme, which is a jekyll setup. For all those, like me, who a week ago didn’t know what Poole or jekyll is, the following two links can give some more details,

• jekyll
• Poole

The following blogs are very popular and give nice hints on how to set up a jekyll based blog with diqus, google analytics etc.

• How I Created a Beautiful and Minimal Blog Using Jekyll, Github Pages, and poole
• Build A Blog With Jekyll And GitHub Pages

As I said I use the Lanyon theme, so I thought a nice idea would be to search on the web using the terms ‘Poole Lanyon jekyll’. The search gave many results and the interesting thing is that many bloggers use this kind of framework. I think the true reasons are that

• it’s not that difficult to implement, even for someone without knowledge of javascript, html etc.
• if the blog is hosted on github it can come in handy especially for those having github repositories. Furthermore, you don’t have to pay a web hosting provider and you get also a domain name for free.
• there are nice R packages like servr and knitr which work pretty well with jekyll, so you can write markdown using Rstudio and upload it to your blog. More about this can be found here, here and here.

For further customization of my blog, like adding archives or tags to the hidden drawer and creating links to github, gravatar I found helpful the following blogs,

• msanand.github.io
• psteadman.github.io
• sckott.github.com

I hope this post will be helpful for anyone interested in building a blog.