GitHub Pages works great to generate simple websites for repositories or the user/organization root site by converting Markdown documents (serverside) with Jekyll. It is possible to modify and tweak all settings (see the basic intro), but this becomes painful quickly.
Poole is a ready-to-use template that I can simply fork into a new repository (or download / push) and works both for the root page as well as project pages (requires modifying the baseurl in _config.yaml). It comes with basic theme support and is very straightforward to modify.
Installing Jekyll locally makes the development easier as it serves pages through http://localhost:4000 after a simple jekyll serve in the repo directory.
There are a couple of decent intros on how to get started with Jekyll in the gh-pages branch of a repo, e.g., this one from 24ways, although the default Jekyll install now is pretty decent. One can also go down the rabbit hole
An improved scaffold over the default Jekyll starting page or the Poole framework is Jekyllbootstrap which comes with a number of templates, minimizing the amount of work that I'd have to do writing my own templates with Liquid. The default theme is Twitter Bootstrap, but there are plenty others. Drawback: no longer under active development, and the canned themes are all so-so. It's also overkill for our needs (social media, comments, blog support, etc.). Might come in handy when developing the course website.
Number of websites around. On the single-page static website front SinglePaged is what I am trying, though others such as Solo are looking good, too. Following the instructions for a new project repository worked well. Code is currently in themeTest published to Pages. The template can bring in icons from FA but I've went with variations of the images we've used before (found in ./img). Added a _resources directory that contains the Keynote document used to generate the images along with the color scheme.
There area number of other simple tricks such as inline color and font changes. See this site (GitHub source code) for some examples.
- Replace text
- http://prose.io/#about, https://github.com/prose/prose/wiki/Prose-Configuration and https://github.com/prose/starter
- Read up on CNAME
- Work through Jekyll docs