bjzhush / aseemk.com

My personal website. Hosted on GitHub Pages, powered by Jekyll.

aseemk.com

This is the source code behind aseemk.com, the personal website of Aseem Kishore.

The website is powered entirely by Jekyll, which uses Markdown and Liquid for markup, and is hosted and served by GitHub Pages.

Adding to, updating and deploying this site is as easy as changing this source and pushing to the gh-pages branch. GitHub Pages help provides more details, including support for custom domains and error pages.

Development

Development of the site could/would/should be as simple as running the Jekyll server and having it watch for file changes:

$ jekyll --auto --server

But this site takes advantage of one cool GitHub Pages feature: support for "clean" extensionless URLs. Jekyll's server doesn't seem to support that, so I personally serve the local site with Apache and use a rewrite rule to mimic GitHub's clean URLs.

That could be achieved via an .htaccess file, but Jekyll doesn't copy dotfiles into the output directory yet. Support for an include config has been added and hopefully ships soon. Until then, I place the rewrite rule in my global Apache config:

<Directory "/path/to/aseemk.com/_site">
    # XXX This should belong in an .htaccess file inside this directory, but
    # that's not possible to automate with Jekyll right now. TODO FIXME Move
    # this into an .htaccess file when Jekyll ships the `include` config.

    # Important: this .htaccess file is only used during devleopment.
    # GitHub Pages in particular do *not* respect anything in here.
    # Only coincidentally, GitHub Pages supports "clean" extensionless URLs:
    # https://github.com/aseemk/gh-pages-test

    # URL rewriting reference:
    # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
    RewriteEngine On

    # Friendly URLs for blog posts! Note no trailing slash.
    # Important: this matches GitHub's approach. Trailing slashes not allowed!
    # TODO Generalize this to work across all sections?
    RewriteRule ^blog/([^.]+)$ blog/$1.html
</Directory>

With this in place, development of the site is just running Jekyll:

$ jekyll --auto