Setting up your own website
I suppose, since you are reading this, you might want to set up your own website as well. I will not be going into the details as to what utility does having your own website serve and fool you around for hours, rather I would get straight to the point.
Disclaimer: This blog is not something to teach you about web development. It’s also not a step by step guide to set up your website, there are great tutorials avaialable out there and I certainly cannot do a better job than what those guys have done. So, I would instead try to provide relavant links that helped me setup my website and could be useful for you as well.
There are various ways to set up your website.
Either you can show off your developer skills and start building your own interface and backend for the website and host it on some server. In this way, you can also get your own domain name and boast your professionalism. But this is not what I am going to talk about in this blog since I have myself not done any sort of this. But it’s sure worth doing if you want a certain level of personalisation.
What I will be talking about and what’s definitely much easier than what I talked about before is using Github Pages for doing the same. Github Pages provides all the functionalities that is provided by the above method, but you don’t have to worry about the complex process of setting up the database, deploying the website on the server etc. As should be evident, this site is also hosted on Github Pages. This should help you get started with github pages. Normally, it should be easy to setup the main website using the steps provided in the previous link. But if you are in a situation like me, with two different websites (one for academic and other a side project) then that needs a little more work. It involves publishing your work on the gh-pages branch of the project you want to publish. The Project Pages section in this link will help you set that.
This website is built using Dark Poole with some changes to the original template here and there. The steps in the repository would be sufficient enough for you to build your own website using this theme.
Something which should be easy to follow, to set up your website is provided in this link. Here is a list of various jekyll themes that you can use. The general way to use any theme is just to go to the github repo of the theme you like and follow the instructions that they have provided in the README. This should be sufficient for getting done with all the basic and pre-loaded things which the template has to offer.
All of the code of this website is open-sourced here and could be looked at for reference at any stage. You have permission to use whatever part of code you want. However, I would strongly suggest you to use layouts I suggested earlier. This is because of the way I have sloppily bodged up things without any documentation and hence, it is very likely to lead to confusion. However, if you want to incorporate some ideas in your template like I have done in mine, you are free to refer to my code.
If you are not looking to set up a complete website like this, building just a webpage can also serve the purpose of showcasing yourself. I have my academic site built only using html, css and bootstrap. I have used this template to built the same. The readme of the source repo contains all the required instructions that one would need and the source code for my webpage is available here which could be used for reference.
On final note - I assume that you too are an undergrad just like me who’s reading this. I know how difficult it is to finally start with building your website. I myself, postponed it for quite a long, always coming up with some reason as to why should I wait. But I strongly suggest, if you want to make it just go ahead and publish it. It is not worth to wait to gather up content for making the webpage, infact the webpage can serve as a pushing factor for you to come up with content.
In case, you still have doubts with you, feel free to reach out to me anonymously or through mail.
That’s it for this post. Hoping to see your own github page soon!