🎉 My First Blog Post!

👋 Hello World!

Welcome to my very first blog post on this brand-new personal website, proudly hosted on GitHub! 🚀

For the longest time, I thought creating a sleek personal website would be awesome—but also super complicated. Turns out, it’s much easier than I imagined. In fact, I built and launched this site in just half a day. 💻⏱️

Here’s how I did it, step by step:

---

1️⃣ Set Up GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages lets you host one free personal website per GitHub username. 🙌

To get started:

• Create a repository named username.github.io
• Add an index.html file as your homepage

That’s it! 🔧 For full instructions, check out the GitHub Pages quickstart guide.

---

2️⃣ Make It Pretty with Jekyll

Jekyll is a static site generator that integrates beautifully with GitHub Pages. It supports themes, templates, and blog features out of the box. ✨

There are tons of great Jekyll themes, and I chose Chirpy for its clean design and blogging support. 🐦

Here’s what I did:

1. Cloned the Chirpy repo: https://github.com/cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy
2. Copied all the files into my username.github.io repo
3. Committed and pushed 🚀

Just like that, I had a beautiful website live on the internet!

---

3️⃣ Customize the Pages

Once the structure was in place, I started customizing the content to make it my own. ✍️

Here’s what I changed:

• 🛠️ Edited _config.yml to include my name, avatar, and social links
• 🙋 Edited _tabs/about.md to write an “About Me” section
• 📝 Wrote this blog post by adding a Markdown file in the _posts/ folder
• 📂 Added a Projects tab and created individual pages for each project

💡 Pro Tip: ChatGPT was super helpful in guiding me through Chirpy’s structure—especially which files to edit and how to preview changes locally.

---