A step-by-step beginner’s guide to creating a personal website and blog using Jekyll and hosting it for free using GitHub Pages.
What is Git, GitHub, and GitHub Pages?
Git, GitHub, and GitHub Pages are all very closely related. Imagine Git as the workflow to get things done and GitHub and GitHub Pages as places to store the work you finish. Projects that use Git are stored publicly in GitHub and GitHub Pages, so in a very generalized way, Git is what you do locally on your own computer and GitHub is the place where all this gets stored publicly on a server.
Git
Git is a version control system that tracks changes to files in a project over time. It typically records what the changes were (what was added? what was removed from the file?), who made the changes, notes and comments about the changes by the changer, and at what time the changes were made. It is primarily used for software development projects which are often collaborative, so in this sense, it is a tool to help enable and improve collaboration. However, its collaborative nature has led it to gain interest in the publishing community as a tool to help in both authoring and editorial workflows.
Git is for people who want to maintain multiple versions of their files in an efficient manner and travel back in time to visit different versions without juggling numerous files along with their confusing names stored at different locations. Think of Git and version control like a magic undo button.
In the diagram below, each stage represents a “save”. Without Git, you cannot go back to any of the in between stages from the initial draft and final draft. If you wanted to change the opening paragraph in the final draft, you’d have to delete data that you couldn’t recover. To work around this, we use the “save as” option, name it something different, delete the opening paragraph and start writing a new one.