#Making a Personal Site This is a simple demo on how to make your very own personal site for free with Github Pages.

#Tools For this project we're going to use 2 FOSS tools. You'll need to install them.

#Installing Follow the instructions on both site to install Node and Harp. Do note that Harp is built on Node so you have to install them in order

#Languages We're going to use a few different languages for this

  • Jade: Is a HTML templating language that makes writing HTML easier
  • Markdown: Is a templating language that make writing for websites easier
  • Less: Is a CSS templating language for easy CSS development

#Setting Up Our Environment

#Create a directory for the source branch of our site
mkdir my_site
cd my_site
git init
git branch -b source
git remote add origin github-url
#Now we need a deploy directory
git clone github-url
#Make the source branch ignore our deploy directory
echo "deploy/" > .gitignore
mkdir source
#Add the source branch to our github
git push origin source

This will give us a working directory for the site (source) and a 'compiled' directory (deploy)

#Developing Development takes place on the source branch/folder. It is important that development is not done on the master directory, the reasoning will be explained later. You can see your changes live in real time using Harp's local server. From the my_site directory just run harp server source and Harp will server any files in there @ localhost:9000.

#Deploying Deploying is really simple. Just compile your site with harp compile source deploy. This will take all your templates in source and spit out HTML, CSS, etc in deploy. Then just commit the changes to your master branch and upload to Github.