Simple web/blog creation for beginners

A mix of github pages, jekyll, js, html, css and bootstrap

Melchor Sanchez-Martinez
03 May 2021


I guess it’s done!!. The web page is fully working in a way that I like it (it can be improved in several ways, and maybe I do it in the future, but not now). I thought it would had easier to customize the repo from bbarad but in the end, although I was inspired/used some code from other github repos, like FraserLab , pattex , codinfox or CharalambosIoannou, I had to learn a little bit of html, css and bootstrap to customize the contact form, tagging blogs posts, etc. In this regard w3schols tutorials have been very useful.

Disquss for comments, Formspree for the contact form, Simplesharingbuttons to create share buttons for the blog posts without forgetting fontawesome for some page style and logos have been very useful also (code examples below). Moreover in SDR, DEV, stackoverflow or reddit there are interesting posts that can be of great help for a beginner to have the web/blog ready.

<div id="disqus_thread"></div>
<script>
    /**
     *  RECOMMENDED CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT AND UNCOMMENT THE SECTION BELOW TO INSERT DYNAMIC VALUES FROM YOUR PLATFORM OR CMS.
     *  LEARN WHY DEFINING THESE VARIABLES IS IMPORTANT: https://disqus.com/admin/universalcode/#configuration-variables
     */
    /*
    var disqus_config = function () {
        this.page.url = PAGE_URL;  // Replace PAGE_URL with your page's canonical URL variable
        this.page.identifier = PAGE_IDENTIFIER; // Replace PAGE_IDENTIFIER with your page's unique identifier variable
    };
    */
    (function() {  // DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE
        var d = document, s = d.createElement('script');

        s.src = 'https://your-disquss-username.disqus.com/embed.js';

        s.setAttribute('data-timestamp', +new Date());
        (d.head || d.body).appendChild(s);
    })();
</script>
<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="https://disqus.com/?ref_noscript" rel="nofollow">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript>

Code example for inserting disquss (provided by Disquss) to allow comments in blog posts

<div class="container">
    <div class="row">
        <div class="col-sm-4 col-md-4 col-xs-12">
          <div style="width:100%;height:263px;border:3px solid gray; border-radius: 8px;background-color:gray;" display="flex;" justify-content="center;">
          <form action="https://formspree.io/f/your-formspree-key" method="POST" id="contact-form">
           <input type="hidden" name="_subject" value="Contact request from personal website">
           <p class="text-center" style="font-size:120%; color:white; font-weight:bold">Drop me a message</p>
           <input type="text" name="Name" placeholder="Your name"  data-validate-field="Name" required=False display="block" style='width:100%;'>
           <p></p>
           <input type="email" class="fcf-form-control" name="_replyto" placeholder="Your email" required=True display="block" style='width:100%'>
           <p></p>
           <textarea name="message" class="fcf-form-control" placeholder="Type your message" required=True style='width:100%; height:100px'></textarea>
           <p></p>
           <button type="submit" style="background-color:skyblue; color:darkblue; border:3px solid skyblue; border-radius: 8px; font-weight:bold;width: 100%" class="button button-center">Submit</button>
          </form>
          </div>
    </div>
</div>

Code example for creating a contact form based on formspree

</div>
<div class="footer">
    <div class="container">
        <ul class="list-inline">
        <li class="footer-inverse"><a href="mailto:your-email"><i class="fa fa-envelope fa-2x"></i></a></li>
        <li class="footer-inverse"><a href="https://linkedin.com/in/your-linkedin-page"><i class="fa fa-linkedin-square fa-2x"></i></a></li>
        <li class="footer-inverse"><a href="https://twitter.com/your-twitter-id"><i class="fa fa-twitter fa-2x"></i></a></li>
        <li class="footer-inverse"><a href="https://github.com/your-github-id"><i class="fa fa-github fa-2x"></i></a></li>
        <li class="footer-inverse"><a href="https://gitlab.com/your-gitlab-id"><i class="fa fa-gitlab fa-2x"></i></a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>
</div>
<script src="/static/js/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/popper.min.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/parallax.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://kit.fontawesome.com/153d2c5511.js" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
</body>
</html>

Code example for using fontawesome to add logos in the footer

It has been funny, not too much difficult (has to be said that I am new in “web programming” but not in programming), but harder of I expected … I supposed that in a couple of afternoons, in a weekend, it could be done… and in the end it took me a couple of weekends and some nights during the week. But I enjoyed the process, so although I still have to learn a lot ,almost everything, about js, html, css, boostrap and jekyll basics I have enjoyed the way (I will probably enroll in some courses in the future…), it was worth it.

I hope these few lines could serve to someone in the same situation I was! Enjoy your web/blog programming/creation!

And if you like how my page looks like and want to use the code, just fork my repo that is available on github. And if you want to go to the prmary sources, as I commented before, go to bbarad or FraserLab repos. Also you can explore more repos on github, actually there are 2,526,710 repositories containing github pages (aka the .github.io extension).

Finally, but not least, stay tuned because from now on I will start posting about different topics. I already have some ideas in mind that I believe could become in interesting posts!