How I Built My Blog

Creating a personal developer portfolio can be surprisingly tricky, especially if you want it to reflect your personality and values. I wanted something simple, elegant and low-maintenance, but still flexible enough to grow with me. In this post, I will walk you through how I built this site using GitHub Pages.

Step 1: Choosing a Theme

After exploring several themes (maybe a bit too many 😅), I picked Clean Blog Jekyll because:

• It had a simple, readable layout
• It already had support for posts and pages
• It looked good on mobile with minimal tweaking

You can either fork the theme or clone it:

git clone https://github.com/StartBootstrap/startbootstrap-clean-blog.git my-site
cd my-site

Step 2: Make it your own

Start by customizing the config. I updated _config.yml with my name, GitHub handle and site description. This file is the brain of a Jekyll site.

Set up GitHub Pages. I pushed the project to cristina-sirbu.github.io repository on Github, enabled Github Pages in the repo settings and the site was live in minutes. (documentation)

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/cristina-sirbu/cristina-sirbu.github.io.git
git push -u origin main

To tweaked the design and make it my own, I changed the background image for each page and started writing the About Me and CV pages.

Step 3: Set up Contact Me page

To allow visitors to contact you directly without exposing your email, I used Formspree. It is a simple, spam-protected way to add a contact form.

Create a file like contact.html in your root or _pages/ directory:

---
layout: page
title: "Contact"
permalink: /contact/
background: '/img/bg-contact.jpg'
---

<h2>Let's get in touch</h2>
<form action="https://formspree.io/f/your_form_id" method="POST">
  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input type="text" name="name" required>

  <label for="email">Email</label>
  <input type="email" name="email" required>

  <label for="message">Message</label>
  <textarea name="message" rows="6" required></textarea>

  <button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>

Go to formspree.io. Sign up and create a new form. Copy the form action URL (e.g., https://formspree.io/f/mabcdxyz and paste it into your <form action="..."> tag.

Step 4: Start writing

My posts live in _posts/ and use Markdown. Writing and versioning content as code is a huge productivity boost.

Reflections

My adivce to my previous self is to not spend too much time with the details (picking the theme, the images, etc.). Just choose something knowing that it will change in the future. Don’t loose focus. The main idea is to share the knowledge. So …

Happy writing! 🙂