How to build a personal website

Joey Yu, 07 May 2020

Introduction

In order to build a personal website that is accessible worldwide, you’ll need to do 3 things:

  1. Create your personal website artifacts;
  2. Create your own domain name for your website;
  3. Host your website in the internet and point your domain name to the host/provider;

And to achieve the goals above, I basically picked up the tools/frameworks below:

  • Jekyll: a framework to create your website;
  • Amazon Route 53: where I purchased my domain name;
  • GitHub Pages: yes! Now GitHub supports hosting personal websites!

Jekyll

Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator perfect for personal, project, or organization sites. And there’re tons of themes you can find online. The theme I choosed is forked from here.

GitHub Pages + Amazon Route 53:

Follow this link to deploy GitHub pages with AWS Route 53 registered custom domain and force HTTPS.

Note: as GitHub Pages only supporst limited number of Jekyll themes and the one I used is just not the lucky ones. Therefore, we need to switch to remote-theme to make it working, see commit.