This is a minimal example of a Jekyll-based website using knitr, blogdown, and R Markdown, briefly documented at https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/jekyll.html.
You can actually serve the Jekyll website locally with R, and R Markdown posts can be compiled automatically, with the web pages being automatically refreshed in your web browser as well. To build the serve the website locally, you need to install blogdown (and Jekyll, of course) and call the serve_site() function:
devtools::install_github("rstudio/blogdown")
blogdown::serve_site()After you are satisfied with the local preview, you can either just push the Markdown blog posts to your Github repo (e.g. the gh-pages branch), and let Github generate the website for you, or host the HTML files generated under the _site/ directory on your own server.
The original website was created from jekyll new . under the root directory, which was part of the official Jekyll repo. The additional code (mainly R code) in this repo is under the MIT License, and the blog post I wrote is under the CC-BY 4.0 International License.
The support for Jekyll is limitted in blogdown, and you may want to switch to Hugo, which is much better supported in blogdown.