• Custom Domain Name

Website built with Jekyll and GitHub Pages

Sep 11, 2016

I'm building this test website by using Jekyll with GitHub pages, but I'm not using a local install of Jekyll, which requires using git to commit the web posts.

I'm using GitHub's web browser editor to create and update pages, which should allow me to create and edit posts from any device.

I created a new GitHub account with username perchwire.

I followed instructions at https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now and I forked that repository. Then I changed the name to perchwire.github.io. The repository is helpful for getting started with using Jekyll and GitHub Pages.

The author of the above repository also created this helpful smashingmagazine.com article titled Build A Blog With Jekyll And GitHub Pages.

In addition to using GitHub's web browser editor to maintain content, I'm testing Development Seed's editor called Prose, which is designed to work with GitHub Pages by connecting to a GitHub account. It's pretty slick. Well done.

When any file is saved within my GitHub Pages repository (perchwire.github.io), GitHub automatically rebuilds the site, or it rebuilds the changed page.

It only took minutes to create the new GitHub account, fork Barry Clark's repository, and edit the config file to see my new website.

Custom Domain Name

From the Smashing Magazine article:

Go to the root of your blog’s repository, and edit the CNAME file to include your domain name (for example, www.yourdomainname.com).

The CNAME file was empty. I added only one line: www.perchwire.com and saved it.

I bought perchwire.com this past summer through my AWS account. I logged into my AWS account and using Route 53, I added the following DNS entry for perchwire.com:

• type = CNAME
• name = www (that was prepended *