A quick project to get my partner up and running on a free, lightweight blogging platform. Since starting a zero-waste/sustainability page in 2019, she wanted to expand it with a basic blog to post recipies and tips. Without knowing how much she'd use it, I didn't want to create anything too heavyweight or add the cost and complexity of a Wordpress-style CMS in, so instead I opted for a simple stack;

• Host on GitHub - free hosting for public repositories as a GitHub Pages site, also has the side effect of nice version control ;)
• Use Jekyll as a blogging engine - this manages tags, template styling, and gives a nice load of themes to customise. It's also suuper lightweight which makes it easy to build and run locally for testing purposes
• Markdown-styled blog posts - again, keeps it simple and lightweight

We found a domain name and hooked that up too, then after a quick intro to GitHub she was good to go! Blog posts get added into the root directory as a markdown .md file, with a basic bit of YAML-like syntax at the start to add in the tags and layout template.

It's super simple, free apart from the DNS registration, and using GitHub pages makes things a lot more simple than a lot of other options.

Check it out here!