Welcome to my first experiment with posting using Jekyll. I’ve been playing with GitHub all day between getting jimgroom.me mapped on GitHub and wrapping my head around Jekyll. I have to say the process has given me a far better sense of how GitHub works, something I’ve be trying to push myself to learn for over a year now.

I wish I could explain what GitHub and Jekyll are exactly, but I have to admit I am still fuzzy. But if you asked me I would say GitHub is a versioning control application that folks figured out can do a whole lot more. Namely, it can run the Ruby application Jekyll which is a simple, static file-based blog application. You install Jekyll locally on your computer, and through the GitHub client can edit, preview locally, and commit edits and the like.

It’s a bit overkill for a blog, but I’m also very new to it all. I imagine there is much more that can be done that I have no concept of.

Here are some useful sites I used in the process of mapping a domain to GitHub and getting Jekyll up and running as the GitHub blog/CMS:

This page takes you through setting up a custom domain with GitHub pages: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/

This page helped me troubleshoot my custom domain issues when mapping to Github. https://help.github.com/articles/my-custom-domain-isn-t-working/

This blog post helped me actually see the DNS settings I needed to map my domain to GitHub cleanly. http://davidensinger.com/2013/03/setting-the-dns-for-github-pages-on-namecheap/

This page helped me get up and running with Jekyll. https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages/

Stackoverflow helped me find an answer to the permissions issue I was having when trying to install RubyGems (the Ruby packager that installs Jekyll): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14607193/installing-gem-or-updating-rubygems-fails-with-permissions-error

Jekyll’s quickstart (because I am impatient) helped me get installed and running (although not that quick): http://jekyllrb.com/docs/quickstart/