Blogging in markdown - Github Pages FTW - Hello, world! I'm Tobias Hoppenthaler

Some of the blogs I read had the domain github.io and I got curious how to host your stuff on github.io. From there I found the link to github pages and jekyll and immediately loved the idea of a static site generator and the ability to write your blog in markdown.

How to get started

I first found it difficult to understand how everything would be linked together but it is simple as that:

you don’t necessarily need to install jekyll on your machine though it helps to preview your posts. If you want to do that, here’s how.
you can just select one of the templates from here, clone them and have most things set up for you already.
you should name the repository that you clone yourusernameatgithub.github.io - then github automatically builds your site with jekyll every time you change that repo and publishes to https://yourusernameatgithub.github.io .

A blogpost that helped me get started and describes more details on how to modify templates and serve at your own domain is this.

UPDATE: I found a lot of handy things for jekyll here: https://github.com/planetjekyll/awesome-jekyll-editors