How to Set up a blog on Github pages
There are many benefits - personal and professional - of having a personal blog. It gives you a platform to express your creative ideas and share knowledge to a large audience. Also, through showcasing your expertise and skills, you attract the attention of potential employers, clients and even collaborators hence putting you in a pole position for new opportunities.
Here, I’ll walk you through step-by-step on how to setup a blog on github pages.
Content Breakdown
Requirements
Installation
Resources
Requirements
- Github account - Sign up for a free account at https://github.com/signup
- Visual Studio code - Download and install VScode from https://code.visualstudio.com/download
Installation
To setup a clean, customizable and responsive blog site, we will integrate Jekyll - a static site generator - with Github pages. First, let’s install Ruby which enables Jekyll to run smoothly. Download Ruby+Devkit 3.2.2-1(x64) (latest version at time of this writing) from https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
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Install using the default setting and ensure the option to “Run ‘ridk install” is checked. Click on Finish
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Upon clicking finish, you will be prompted to choose what components to install. Click Enter.
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After it completes, initiate command prompt and run the following command to install all the dependencies
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gem install jekyll bundler
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Congratulations for reaching this far! Let’s go on…
Next, proceed to https://github.com/cotes2020/chirpy-starter. Click on ‘Use this template’ to toggle the drop-down and select Create a new repository.
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Careful here!
Under Repository name, enter the name of your github page. Syntax: your_github_username.github.io
Select Public and finally Create repository.
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Once done creating the repo, Click on ‘Code’ to toggle the drop-down and copy the url as hightlighted below 
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Open Visual Studio and select ‘Clone Git Repository’ as shown below.
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Paste the copied url and hit Enter.
Select your desired destination folder and ‘Select as Repository Destination’.
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When prompted, open the cloned repository. It should resemble the one below.
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So far so good. Let’s continue…
Within Visual Studio, open a terminal as guided below and run the following command.
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bundle
This will bundle up all the jekyll dependencies.
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As per theme’s documentation, we need to copy some critical files from the theme’s gem to jekyll’s site. See below 
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Let us run the following command to locate these files.
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bundle info --path jekyll-theme-chirpy
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Follow the path i.e. C:/Ruby32-x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.2.0/gems/jekyll-theme-chirpy-6.2.2
Below, A is the jekyll site and B is the theme’s gem. So we copy _config.yml, _plugins, _tabs, index.html from B to A
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Almost there!
Let’s go ahead and stage our changes, commit them and push them to the remote repo
Use the following commands
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git add .
git commit -m <message>
git push
Note: The angle brackets are not part of message
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It is likely you’ll get a request to authorize Git-ecosystem. Accept the request 
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We can see the changes in our repository by clicking on the Actions tab.
Once the process is successfully complete, click on the link beneath deploy
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Congratulation! Your site is up and running.
Just some customizations now.
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To change the default configurations, we will edit the _config.yml file. Here you can modify the title, tag line, avatar, among other settings.
Make sure to input the your github.io link in the url field
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In the next post, I will cover the following:
Creating our first post
Troubleshooting
Resources
For further readings, please refer to the below resources
- [https://jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/]
- [https://github.com/cotes2020/chirpy-starter]
- [https://github.com/cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy#readme]