This is the Jekyll source for my site, adapted from Adrian Sampson's site. The design, code, and content are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

How to deploy it for yourself

It shouldn't be too tricky to deploy it on your own. In general, you should follow the official instructions for this, but I'll sort of reiterate them and make additional suggestions here:

First, you'll fork my repository - I'm not taking pull requests (that would essentially be like a guest post I guess), so you'll want to have your own repo.

Fork is in the top right hand corner. Click it and you'll have a repo called alialkhatib.githubpages.io. Hurray! Except it won't work that way. Change the repo name to yourusername.githubpages.io - this is just a semi-arbitrary requirement for a personal page to work. I mean it's reasonable, but you just have to trust that this whole thing won't work if it doesn't match your user name and everything. Why can't the name be whatever? Because, that's why.

Once it's renamed, go into your terminal and clone:

$ git clone https://github.com/yourusername/yourusername.github.io.git

Now that you have the code, there are a few tweaks I suggest people make:

• This is really important because it'll be really confusing for me otherwise: in _layouts/default.html there's a snippet of code at the bottom for Google Analytics. It has the effect of putting that code everywhere on the site. It's great. It also specifically associates to my account, so if someone were to fork my repository and not remove that code (kinda like how we're doing things), then it'd confuse my analytics. If you have Google Analytics, all you really need to do is change the value that reads

ga('create', 'UA-54110533-1');

so that the code is yours. That's it! If you don't use Google Analytics, you should probably just comment out the whole <script> block at the bottom of the page.

• You should either remove CNAME or change the value of it based on the domain name you're going to use. There are excellent instructions (by GitHub, no less!) here, and you should follow them. There's also some acrobatics you'll need to do with A records and your domain registrar, and I remember it being vaguely confusing, but I can't remember any specific tips. The GitHub page on it was good. Follow those instructions and make the appropriate changes with your registrar.

• You'll really want to get into the _config.yml file at the root of the directory and change stuff like name, Twitter handle, etc... as it'll get applied to some other stuff around the site.

• You'll probably figure on this, but you'll want to change the research.md, contact.md, index.md, etc... files, delete all of the posts in _posts, fix the boilerplate draft in _drafts so it says stuff like your name and whatnot, and maybe tweak the colors and other stylistic choices made in _source/main.less.

• Do yourself a favor and make/use a better favicon than the one I use.

Once you've done all that, go ahead and commit, push, and then debug why it might not have worked right away.