Keith Graham

I knew that you could host web pages on GitHub.com, but I did not know how to go about it. The tutorials are all for Linux, and involve Jekyll software, which only runs on Linux.

95% of the world runs on Windows. I started slogging through the documentation, trying to figure out how to make things work. You can see the results on https://www.ErrorMessageEyes.com. Getting to the point where it worked was not easy.

I use Cloudflare as a domain registrar, so it was easy to set up the domain and DNS.

The rest was not obvious. I downloaded GitHub Desktop software, which is not all that useful, but it was good to set up a new repository and a branch for the project.

I keep the websites that I have on Google Drive so that I can work with them on any of the computers that I use.

I use Kompozer to create the website. The days of me being able to code CSS by hand are gone. My brain no longer works that way.

GitHub Desktop updates my repository and branch easily.

I had to log into GitHub on the browser to get at the options to use the GitHub pages option. It is a menu item hidden deep in the settings menu. I can’t remember what I did exactly, but I fiddled a bit with the settings, and when I set the custom domain to ErrorMessageEyes.com, it all magically worked. If I had to do it again, I am not sure that I could get it to work at first. If I wanted to add another domain, I think that I would have to add another repository and branch.

One last thing, if I make changes to the HTML, I have to clear the cache in Firefox in order to see them. There is some option that tells the browser to use the cached version of the page, even if the page has changed. I find this annoying.

GitHub looks like a fairly dumb hosting option without Java, PHP, Perl or any other scripting language. That’s why you need something like Jekyll to make it work. I wish that someone would create an easy way to create a static website that I could push to GitHub using Windows.