I’m impressed with how easy it was to set up this site. The documentation says “Get up and running in seconds” but that’s not always the case. This time it was. I simply followed the Quickstart article, and I was up and running in no time. I love that some things just came out of the box:

Clean Theme

The default Minima theme is just what I wanted. A simple layout that allows me to set up some pages and easily create blog posts.

Google Analytics

Setting up your google analytics account is as easy as adding google_analytics: UA-XXXXXXX-Y to the _config.yml file.

Automagic deployment

I did not want to bother with hosting this. GitHub Pages has a magic integration with Jekyll sites. Magic as in it works as soon you set the Source branch on your repo’s Settings page. No deployment or configuration needed. If you’re looking to set up a user page, you’ll need to remember that the name of the repository needs to follow the <username>.github.io naming convention. In my case, this was smaraf.github.io. It took a few minutes for the site to be up and running at https://smaraf.github.io/.