Hello! This is part of a multi part series on some of the customizations I’ve made to this Jekyll site. This first part will cover the what the stack is, and why I chose what I did.
NOTE: As of 5-2-2020, I’ve moved this site to netlify
The What
The code is hosted on github, so all changes are kept in version control. This site is compiled with Jekyll, a static site generator powered by ruby. The code generation is run and hosted by Netlify.
The Why
This is a complete re-write of my personal site. My stuff was previously hosted on Godaddy and was a bit pricy and a very overkill for what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to be able to jot down ideas to share and thoughts to remember. I wanted simplicity. I wanted inexpensive, and my hosting was expiring shortly.
Why Jekyll?
Jekyll is a very straight forward static site generator written in my current language of choice, ruby. It can parse markdown files for blog posts and pages and generates the needed HTML. This makes it great for quick blog posts, or more in depth ones such as this.
Why not github pages? The code itself is stored on a repo there, and github pages are free.
Great question. Github pages are only free for public repositories. I’m a fairly private person, I like to take my time with things I’m writing, so the repo is private. While the $7 a month for github PRO is not a big deal, github pages also does not support building the site with more than just a few select plugins. I want to be able to blog from anywhere and have my site built remotely without needing to setup a local dev environment to generate the site locally just to make post.
Ok, so why Heroku?
I’m familiar with how it works and I’ve had good success in the past running some other sites there. I can customize the build process and know that my site will be hosted reliably and, in this case, inexpensively. Heroku has a free plan that sleeps when there is no activity. This site isn’t visited super often, and being a static site, spins up super quickly. If this site gains popularity for some reason, I can easily scale with heroku just by switching my plan.
So why change to Netlify?
After some research and looking at some sites a few colleagues have built, I thought I’d give Netlify a shot. They’ve got free static site hosting and their build platform was compatible with the custom scripts I added to get the site running as I wanted. A couple big pluses are:
- Netlify offers free SSL certificates with LetsEncrypt
- Netlify will auto renew the SSL certs as well
- Always up site, no sleeping as I’d get on Heroku’s free plan