Make academic website netlify / github

Hello. Sorry if this isn’t the right place. I am trying to follow various guides about setting myself up with a website using Netlify and Github. I have my netlify test page here:

Which is being ‘fed’ from my Github repo here:

But when I can’t figure out is how to get the website to appear at jimshady.github.io ? Anyone got any ideas please?

Thanks

James

I could be wrong, but I don’t think that github.io domains can be managed by users.

If you are using Netlify, you can use <pick you name>.netlify.com or even any other custom domain of your own. I wouldn’t use Github Pages just to get the github.io domain :slight_smile:

Hmm. Thanks. Maybe I’m getting confused. I’ve been reading these docs …

I know that if I make a HTML file inside a github repository at jimshady.github.io that that pages appears at the website jimshady.github.io . So I think maybe I need to copy the academic-kickstart docs into the right folder or something.

I’m a bit confused. :frowning:

You might want to take a bit of a step back.

What do you want to achieve? Do you want a site at something.github.io or do you want something with a personalised domain name (e.g. I’m using it.knightnet.org.uk for my personal blog).

If you really want a github.io address, the source code for your site needs to end up in the right location in a GitHub repo. Which folder somewhat depends on the type of site. There are 2 types and I’m sure we can talk you through the options and locations if this is what you want. In this case, the only real reason for using netlify would be to recompile the site when your source text or design changes. You would need to send the output from Netlify back to the correct GitHub repo/folder.

If you want a custom domain (and why wouldn’t you!), then you and use any GitHub repo or indeed GitLab. Then let netlify do its thing and create and publish the site for you. Then you need to apply your domain name to the netlify site. Again, there are a couple of ways to do this and we can surely take you through them if that’s what you want to do.

To recap, there is a split between the SOURCE code for your site and the location that DELIVERS your site. GitHub can do both but it isn’t always the best option for both. Netlify only does the build & delivery part.

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Excellent answer, thank you @TotallyInformation .

Basically I would like to have a personal website which I can use as a resume. I came accros the ‘academic-kickstart’ website and theme, and thought it was the type of thing I would be happy with.

Regarding domain stuff … well. I would be happy to have my own domain of course. But I’m sure I’ll have to pay for that (won’t I ?), so for now I’m quite happy to use jimshady github.io as the domain for my site. Then maybe in time I could look to move it to a personal domain.

Background to my skills … I’m a data scientist. I do lots of coding in R/Python and general data analysis … and know some basic HTML/CSS type stuff … I’ve ran a few wordpress sites … but this is a bit out of my comfort zone.

Thanks for the offer of help. Much appreciated. Thoughts on how to proceed?

I asked about the personal domain because, if you are trying to market yourself as a professional, a domain will be massively helpful to you in the future & the quicker you can get started, the more history you will have behind you - something that is looked for in many professional markets.

The cost is a few dollars per year - maybe a couple of cups of coffee, 1 if you live somewhere expensive! Best thing I ever did online. I think I registered my first domain in 2000. I’ve been using it continuously since then for both websites and email.

If you create something as a github.io site (as I recently did as I needed something quicker than my blog which was running on WordPress), you will often regret it later when you would prefer to put it onto a more professional standard. Locking into github also prevents you from making use of better facilities later on - migration is a pain.

So my advice is - firstly buy a domain. Then get one of the starter scripts for Hugo, choose a theme, create a couple of pages of content, push to github, register with netlify, publish your site, assign the domain to the site. Job done.

@JimShady Please do not post the link to your GitHub website multiple times. The Forum spam bot has gone crazy and by accident one of your posts in this topic was hidden.

Sorry about that.

No problem. New users are restricted to 2 links per post and by quoting your first post you went over the limit.

After some time the link limit is lifted by the forum software automatically.

EDIT
I just managed to unhide your second comment @JimShady
Ha! Eat that spam bot.
At least we humans can override the bots (for now).

2 Likes

@TotallyInformation – I get what you are saying about buying a domain … but I’d still like to go ahead with what I’m trying at the moment. I’m not ready for my own domain yet. I’d like to think about it for a while and do this in the meantime. So putting me being annoying aside (hehe) … would you be able to advise on how to proceed pretty please?

OK, so putting the sidetracks aside - let me see if I’ve got this right.

  1. You want to create a Hugo site that can be deployed as a github site?
  2. You plan to use Netlify to automatically do the build process - taking from the GitHub repo, doing the build and pushing back to github?

I’ll be honest and say I don’t know how to do point number 2 - yet :slight_smile:

This seems to describe how to do it, but I’m struggling implementing it.

OK, just checking whether there is still some confusion here.

In that article, you use 1 GitHub repo for the content and structural source of your site and then either:

  1. Netlify (to do the build, deploy and serve), or
  2. another GitHub repo to hold the output of the build that you do on your development machine, GH uses that 2nd repo to deploy and serve the site.

Which do you prefer to do?

  1. Free’s you from having to do a build locally at all. The resulting site would be available on something.netlify.com
  2. Forces you to do a local build, the resulting site would be available on something.github.com

In addition, the netlify route gives you a lot more control for when you are ready to use it (e.g. redirects and proper security headers). GitHub doesn’t give you any control at all.

Is that clearer?

Hey @TotallyInformation. Seems I have unfortunately been misreading/misunderstanding how things work. I have been aiming for having my content on github … not having to build locally … and ending up with a website at username.github.com . Which doesn’t seem like it’s an option. :frowning:

Just thinking out loud @TotallyInformation . What I asking for is to set a custom domain within netlify , and make the custom domain my github page, right? i.e. username.github.com . But that’s what you aren’t sure can be done ? Know this isn’t helpful, just thinking out loud.

No worries. Indeed, that is what I’m not sure about. If I get chance later, I’ll have a look to see if I can figure it out.

It would, of course, be easier to stick a single static page up on github that points to your real site :slight_smile:

If you want to get the username.github.io you need to convert your github repository into a github page - https://pages.github.com - and doing so, you really don’t need to put things in netlify. Github Pages works has your website host. Since you already have your repository with your username, the simpliest way is to create a new branch “gh-pages”.

This article looks like like it might provide a solution, using Travis rather than Netlify.
https://medium.com/zendesk-engineering/how-to-create-a-website-like-freshswift-net-using-hugo-travis-ci-and-github-pages-67be6f480298
Bear in mind though that you could just host it on Netlify for free with with a url like jimshady.netlify.com and then link a custom domain to that when you feel ready to purchase a domain in the future.

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But that doesn’t get round the build issue does it? I think that GitHub can only build Jekyll.

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Yeah I think you are right about the building.

I’m coming around to the idea of a single page GitHub solution. Going to start searching for some good templates.