How is this website done?

I was dissatisfied with my Wordpress website and with my hosting company and wanted to start anew. On top of that, there was a bunch of languages and tools I didn’t know much about and wanted to learn: html, Markdown, knitr or GitHub to name a few. In other words, the idea was to kill many birds with one stone: get a new website and learn to use these tools and languages in the process. Hopefully, this can help people in my situation get started.

Why this particular setup? Using GitHub means that you get free hosting but also that you have access to all the perks of using it for version control. Websites hosted on Github are built with Jekyll and many Jekyll themes are available. This website uses the Jekyll Now theme but I customized it considerably.

I based this customization on three academic websites that I think have a great layout: Kieran Healy, Thomas Leeper, and Sean Anderson.

My website is somewhat simpler than theirs so feel free to fork my repository if you’d like to play around with it. And please, don’t laugh at my inefficient html and css. Helpful comments are welcome!