How This Website Came to Be

After teaching others to create portfolio websites, I felt the urge to build one for myself. This decision set me off on an exciting journey of discovery and creation, which I am thrilled to share with you.

Initially, I wanted something more robust than a simple HTML site, something scalable for my growing needs. While exploring options, I stumbled upon Jekyll — a static site generator ideal for personal websites. Jekyll suited my requirements perfectly, offering flexibility and built-in blogging features that work seamlessly with GitHub Pages.

To start off, I immersed myself in learning how to use Jekyll effectively. After a focused learning sprint, I gained a solid understanding of its capabilities and was ready to begin building.

Finding and Customizing a Theme

One significant task was finding a theme that matched my style. I spent hours scouring through websites until I discovered le4ker’s personal Jekyll theme. Its clean, professional, and personable look resonated with me. With some tweaks and customizations, it became the foundation for my website.

I customized the theme with my information and altered its styling to reflect my taste. While GitHub Pages offered an excellent starting point, I wanted something more personal, leading me to acquire my own domain name. A simple Google search presented many options, and I focused on finding the best combination of price and services for a domain, DNS provider, and email service.

Setting Up a Custom Domain

Linking the domain to my GitHub site was the final step, offering rewarding technical challenges. To begin, I pushed my changes and tested them on the default GitHub Pages URL (kushalm.github.io). The next step involved verifying my custom domain.

Here’s a simplified breakdown of how I did it:

Domain Verification: I went to my profile settings and accessed the “Pages” tab. There, I added the domain I wanted to verify and created a TXT record with my DNS provider. A TXT record is a type of DNS record used for various purposes like domain ownership verification and email security.

Configuring GitHub Pages: After domain verification, I navigated to my repository settings and entered my custom domain under the pages settings. I also added the DNS A records provided by GitHub, which you can find detailed here.

To learn more about setting up GitHub Pages with Jekyll, and configuring a custom domain, check out the GitHub Pages documentation.

Building this website has evolved into more than just a personal project. It’s become a platform to share my thoughts, showcase my work, and connect with like-minded individuals.

For anyone contemplating creating their website: take the leap and start building. There is never a better day than today to begin something new.