Thanks to Andrew Best for sharing this post earlier today about getting a website setup in an hour (and to Geoffrey Huntley for being Andrew’s inspiration), as I’ve been neglecting this site in a few ways and it was precisely the shot in the arm I needed.
TL;DR:
- I’ve been using Jekyll for a while, but I wasn’t using GitHub Pages because I wanted to use some syntax highlighing extensions that weren’t enabled. There might be a way to do this now, but I’m always stumbling into problems with updating my local Ruby install so revisiting this isn’t a priority
- while GitHub Pages recently rolled out HTTPS support for custom domains, this site is hosted on Heroku and so I’d need to use their solution (which is still Let’s Encrypt-based)
- it’s a static site and was auto-deployed from
masterso it was trivial to push new changes, but running on Heroku required running Rack and having more moving parts than necessary - I’d heard about Netlify but for some reason hadn’t connected that I could use it for hosting this blog, and Andrew’s post talked about Hugo which I’ve dabbled with for another project and figured I could port the existing content over (some of it I just want to leave in the past).
Anyway, the new source for this site is available on GitHub and now supports HTTPS, so that was a couple of hours well spent on a lazy Sunday. I’ll likely be tweaking the theme some more as I get settled in and try to write more often.
Some other notes:
- the use of YAML front matter in Hugo meant I was able to port things over fairly quickly
- Hugo uses aliases to handle redirects - each path you specify in the front matter results in a stub page with
http-equiv="refresh"meta tags to perform the redirect. Not sure how I feel about this approach as serving up the properHTTP 30*response feels More Correct™, and there’s probably a way to do it with Netlify if I wanted to push that out of each page, but whatever. - I chose a fairly vanilla theme and tweaked the layout a bit, but I’ll venture out to something more custom once I figure out what I want to write about and how to organize things
- I discarded most of the old posts with syntax highlighting, so I’ll figure what that experience looks like with an upcoming post.