Find a free Jekyll theme online, fork the repo, follow the readme installation instructions and create a blog for this course. Check the license to make sure that forking and modifying is acceptable to the original author.
This was the theme I selected: Minima | Demo
Minima has been scaffolded by the
jekyll new-themecommand and therefore has all the necessary files and directories to have a new Jekyll site up and running with zero-configuration.
Here are some resources for selecting a theme:
After forking, I changed the name of the repository in Github to blog-template, cloned the repo to my local machine.
To run the blog locally, I had to check my ruby version, install "bundler", read through the readme installation instructions for minima, delete "gemspec" from my gem file and remove an "seo" tag from the head.html; all prescribed in my terminal when trying to run bundle exec jekyll serve for a local. Each blog will be different and will probably require different modifications on your machine.
For basic stylistic changes (colors, fonts), you can edit the _sass/minima.scss file while running locally.
When ready, you can enable "gh-pages" by navigating from your Github repo to Settings/GitHub Pages and selecting to "publish" from the master branch. It will populate in your url at this address: https://YOUR_USERNAME.github.io/YOUR_REPONAME/.
The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.