Jekyll with github pages
GitHub pages is a fast, confortable and powerful solution if you need a simple homepage. In addition to that it’s fully integrated with github environment.
In the beginning you should create a simple repository with this naming convention: $username.github.io Although this works out of box, you can have more! jekyll site generator can support more dynamic solutions.
This blog is based on that.
This blog template is based on István Viczián example. I wanted to write blog posts in English and Hungarian, so I had to change some points.
Jekyll has a lot of modules, but Github Pages supports just few of them: supported versions. Of course Multi languages plugin is not on the list. Sad face included…
There are some good articles about multi language support with Jekyll:
Imho documentation belongs to the code base, and it should be as close as possible to the real working system, plus it should be generated if possible. As a result I wrote my short dev notes in docs directory in my example projects. I hoped that there is a solution for that. Actually there is a remote include plugin, but it’s not on the supported list neither. So I stayed with copy-paste… Shame! Shame!
There could be a third, more professional solution: you can build your own CI pipeline for the page. I found a good blog post, but I didn’t implement it. Last option could be the poor man’s CI, when you build and run your page locally with all of the plugins and publish just the result _site directory. It’s the worst and ugliest option, so I drop the idea.
Language selection could be cleaner, not just a link to english/hungarian main page. In meta data I added lang-ref and it could link directly between translations (this is supported by the multilang plugin). Nevertheless I doubt that anyone will read the same thing in two languages. I added just a simple browser lang based forwarder script. SEO experts will cry in the corner, because search robots will punish it in scores.
If I would register a domain then it’s easy to activate it with a CNAME file in root directory. Domain(s) can be written there and after that template variables will use this. Out of box supported, simple and elegant.