Site Stats for Nerds

We wrote this website line by line, without a builder! Sounds hard, right? Well we had a little bit of help... This website is hosted by GitHub through the GitHub Pages service. GitHub Pages will host an organization (or user) website for absolutely free, and it's through their servers, so it's fast! Pages also allows you to use a platform called Jekyll. Jekyll is where the real magic is, and it's what made writing this website so much fun. Adding this entire page took me literally 5 minutes. How, you ask? The hardest part was thinking out all these words... :) Check out the code for this page so far:

---
layout: default
---
<h1>;Site Stats for Nerds</h1>

<p>We wrote this website line by line, without a builder!  Sounds hard, right?
  Well we had a little bit of help...  This website is hosted by GitHub through
  the GitHub Pages service.  GitHub Pages will host an organization (or user) website
  for absolutely free, and it's through their servers, so it's fast!  Pages
  also allows you to use a platform called <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>.
  Jekyll is where the real magic is, and it's what made writing this website so
  much fun.  Adding this <i>entire</i> page took me literally 5 minutes.  How, you ask?
  The hardest part was thinking out all these words...  :) Check out the
  code for this page so far:</p>

The little bit at the top is called front-matter, and it's used to add tags, specify which layout is to be used, or change certain features of the page. Jekyll is based on Ruby, and allows you to use Ruby to do cool stuff (I'll explain in a minute) that is run at "compile" time. For example, one is the cool things this code can do is a site search. It will also require some JavaScript to actually do the searching since this is on GitHub pages, but the whole thing is powered by this bit of Jekyll-executed script:

---
---
[
  {% for post in site.pages %}
  {% include post.json %},
  {% endfor %}
  null
]

Jekyll is just so cool, and the main reason I like it is that it gives you robust features while sticking true to plain HTML/CSS. So basically I just wrote this page so that maybe someone who wanted to make a website now knows about Jekyll! Go check it out! If you want to see all the code for this website, go check it out on the GitHub repo. More info about GitHub Pages. They also have a guide about getting started with Jekyll.

Also, parts of the guide are written by people like you! We are trying the make the guide as extensive as possible; if you are interested in helping you can learn more here.