In the zone

I got a Rackspace server a decade and a half ago in order to host my blog and satisfy my need to learn about server administration, security, and all that good stuff. Over the years I moved around, first to Media Temple then Digital Ocean then to AWS until finally getting tired of the serve management and throwing everything up into a shared hosting service.

That was fine for a few years, but I’m not doing any hosting work lately, and it seemed like a wasteful expense for a blog I haven’t been updating.

I’ve been making static sites with Jekyll for years and decided to throw my blog into it and host directly from my GitHub account. The pages environment is free, fast, and lets you use your custom domains, so it doesn’t really make sense to keep paying for hosting.

As a programmer, I am getting satisfaction from seeing all my posts in a Git repository, stable and versioned. No more tweaking PHP or worrying about WordPress and plugin vulnerabilities.

Pros

  • Free!
  • Static sites are fast - like, crazy fast
  • Cross-linking posts is way easier - searching my file system for post content is fast and straightforward
  • Markdown for programming articles works so much better than editing in WordPress
  • The workflow for adding new articles and pages is simple
  • It’s easier to think about the files and resources I’m using in my build

Cons

  • Less control. If GitHub doesn’t support it, I can’t do it
  • Static, so no more comments/discussion. I haven’t seen anything other than spam in years, so I’m not feeling much pain from this.
  • If GitHub decides to stop making pages free, I’ll have to move again. Whatever, I have the source code
  • If Jekyll changes I won’t be able to build the site. Rebuilding to something else from source would be painful
  • Doing complicated layout things is slooowww. I don’t love the templating engine