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Jekyll based blogs hosted on GitHub pages

In many courses in which students are exposed to free open source software, they are asked to write reflections or answer questions about the new material. This is frequently done via blog posts. There are many blogging sites available.

Here is yet another possible setup for blogs using Jekyll and GitHub pages.

Setting up repositories

The weekly directory in this repository contains files required for a basic blog setup. Each student should have a public repository (in a course organization, in their own account, or ...) that will host their blog. The repository should be populated with the files from the weekly directory. (If you are teaching large classes and need to be able to create a large number of identical repositories look into GitHub classroom or teachers pet).

Customization for each student.

Following the initial setup by an instructor, each student needs to customize their own blog. Here are the steps for students:

  • locate your repository (in the class organization or elsewhere), it should be called YOUR_ID-weekly

  • goto Settings and scroll down to GitHub Pages section

  • switch the None option to master branch (WARNING: students need administrative access to their respositories for this step or this step needs to be completed by someone who has that access)

  • edit _config.yml file and follow the instructions in the comments

  • edit the about.md file to include some information about yourself (make sure that you are using mardown to format this page)

Creating blog posts

The blog posts (weekly or otherwise) are created by adding markdown formatted files to the _posts directory. The file name has to match a very specific format YYYY-MM-DD-TITLE.md, for example 2018-01-28-week01.md. The template should contain a file for the first one or two posts for the students to use. Each of the files corresponds to a single blog post.

Changing layouts (optional)

The provided template has a very simple design. Each student can customize this basic layout by changing the files in _layouts directory, index.html file and style.scss file. For more information about it, go through Jekyll documentation pages.