I created the BlogInABox[1] devcontainer to help people get started with Jekyll + GitHub pages. It's a repo that you can fork that has a site ready to go, and a devcontainer that has nice utilities like spellcheck & markdown linting/fixing. This way, you can use it locally in a devcontainer or with github codespaces and a simplified process.

It comes with a companion site [2] that shows how to get scheduled posts, comments, etc. working nicely.

[1] https://github.com/SeanKilleen/blog-in-a-box-container/ [2] https://bloginaboxdemo.com/

Hope this is helpful!