I have had my blog hosted many different places (weblogs.asp.net, wordpress.com, etc.) earlier but finally decided to host on GitHub, mainly because the remote theme option seemed attractive.
Having said that, the overall experience has not been smooth. I thought originally that adding of the _config.yml and _posts folder with the content will suffice but I ended up providing overrides in many places which you can see in my repo. I faced a lot of challenges and had to override default settings to make it work. Mainly the Disqus integration. As you can tell, I’m simply using the remote theme of Basically Basic mmistakes Jekyll.
I’m using the following commands to test the changes locally, knowing nothing in detail about how I can debug Jekyll. This is with the assumption that the Jekyll is installed correctly on your machine. Hope this helps!
bundle exec jekyll serve --watch
Let me know your thoughts on the if there is any other better way to handle the overrides for the remote themes. Thanks!