Making a GitHub Profile ReadMe

It’s quick and easy to update your GitHub profile so that it looks clean and impressive, follow along to learn how to make your profile stand out! Check out my pages on GitHub and LinkedIn

Photo by Richy Great on Unsplash

To begin, you need to create a repo on your GitHub that has the same name as your GitHub profile. This is as simple as making a new folder on your computer with the same name as your GitHub profile, and opening it in your code editor of choice, mine is Visual Studio Code, available at the link. Inside of your editor, create a new file called README.md, this is a markdown file. Markdown is a lightweight markup language that uses plain text formatting syntax. A cheat sheet is available through the documentation here. Or you can check out my GitHub profile for the code, and edit it to suit your needs.

Once you’re done editing the readme, push your changes to GitHub, and make sure the repo is public. There should be an option on the side to show this page on your profile, click that, and you should have the following!

When you finish it should resemble something like this

This is a pretty standard look for a GitHub page, but if you want to step up your profile, you can add links to your blog posts that automatically update. By using blog-post-workflow, you can incorporate it into your GitHub page, and not have to worry about updating your GitHub every time you post a new blog. The instructions are available here. The basics are, inside of your folder, make a folder called ‘.github/workflows/blog-post-workflow.yml’. This will make two folders, with blog-post-workflow.yml inside of workflows. Inside of blog-post-workflow.yml paste the following inside:

name: Latest blog post workflow
on:
schedule: # Run workflow automatically
- cron: '0 * * * *' # Runs every hour, on the hour
workflow_dispatch: # Run workflow manually (without waiting for the cron to be called), through the Github Actions Workflow page directly
jobs:
update-readme-with-blog:
name: Update this repo's README with latest blog posts
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: gautamkrishnar/blog-post-workflow@master
with:
feed_list: "https://medium.com/feed/@edward-ea-acosta"

Change the feed_list to your blogs, which can be separated by commas if you have multiple.

For DevTo, use the following format: https://dev.to/feed/username

For Medium: https://medium.com/feed/@username

Back inside your ReadMe file, place the following wherever you want your blog post to be on your profile.

<!-- BLOG-POST-LIST:START -->

<!-- BLOG-POST-LIST:END -->

Now, every hour your GitHub will check your blogs to see if any changes have been made! To get started on it now, go to the action tab on your folder in GitHub, and then click on Run Workflow to manually update your page.

The last thing I added to my page is GitHub stats, which is super simple to implement. This was made by a GitHub user anuraghazra, and the repo is linked here. In order to use his code, all you need to do is add the following line to your ReadMe.

<img align=”left” alt=”whychooseaname's GitHub Stats” src=”https://github-readme-stats.vercel.app/api?username=whychooseaname&show_icons=true&hide_border=true" />

Just replace whychooseaname with your GitHub username, and you’ll get the following image after committing your changes.

You can also use a ReadMe generator made by GitHub user rahuldkjain. I hope you found this blog helpful! Here is my README file’s source code, and here is my GitHub profile, where you can see how it turned out!

Thanks for giving my blog a read, happy coding!