Just chiming in to promote this a bit. GitLab is a well-known open source alternative to GitHub, which actually offers more features than GitHub nowadays.
And Gitlab Pages supports free CI for building your static HTML assets however you like, upon code push, without cluttering your repo with compiled assets. Run code through Metalsmith? No problem. Run through Jekyll? Can do. Anything that's Dockerized.
This is perhaps my favorite distinction between Github and Gitlab pages.
There are also several in-progress feature requests related to Let's Encrypt automation, which should make HTTPS much easier. (Right now it's possible to use Let's Encrypt, but you have to manually renew the cert every 90 days.)
I just moved from this setup to GitLab. GitLab Pages is similar, but much more flexible. For instance, you can use Hugo, Metalsmith, etc, and you can use CI scripts to test before deploymemt. You can also avoid Cloudflare by using Let's Encrypt (or other) certs, and they're working to include smooth Let's Encrypt integration for easy renewals.
Of course, flexibility comes at a cost: GitLab is much more complicated, and the documentation kinda sucks. OTOH, the setup process is a good learning experience.
Check out Netlify (https://www.netlify.com) for a simpler setup that's also free and lets you use Jekyll plugins, enables very aggressive caching on the CDN level, but with instant cache invalidation and atomic deploys, and brings features like deploy previews (a unique preview URL for any pull request), form processing, redirects, rewrite rules, proxying, etc, etc...
As long as I've been reading HackerNews (all the way back since it was called StartupNews), it's been common to see founders chime in about their startups when they are clearly relevant to the topic and it's not done by a marketing drone posting on their behalf, and with a clear disclaimer.
Whether people gets downvoted or upvoted for it depends on whether readers see the comment as legitimate and relevant or as spam...
I don't think HN has any specific rules about self-promotion in comments, but their service seems relevant given all the extra features it offers in comparison to the blog post's suggested host of GH Pages.
OT: I like Jekyll for blogs, but I'm looking for something simpler to better fit a simple use case.
I want to generate static HTML files, the simplest example being a 5 page website that uses the same header and footer template across all pages. I want static files for simple scaling, not PHP or JS templating. Ideally this tool would be node based for simple automation with gulp. Anything out there that fits the bill? Handelbars.js with precompiler looks like a good fit, but I'm curious what others use in this scenario.
I tried Jekyll before, but between Ruby, some bugs and template choice overload I dropped it. Moved to Hexo a few months ago and built a couple projects with it. It's worked great for writing but also building a reviews website.
Nunjucks is an excellent JS template engine for this kind of work, since it permits template inheritance. It's quite similar to Jinja in Python, if you're familiar with it.
Other options would be Middleman or Metalsmith. I've used both of them successfully for relatively complex static sites. But I wouldn't call them simpler than Jekyll.
Fair enough. My only experience with Ruby was to get Jekyll running so it wasn't as familiar to me, but the community and support is a pretty strong point.
Two of the cons listed aren't totally correct:
> You don’t have a WYSIWYG editor so you have to use Markdown or similar languages to write your posts.
You can use a service like siteleaf to add a WYSIWYG backend to jekyll
> You have to deal with a Terminal to push your changes using GIT
Github's desktop application is actually pretty easy to use, much more so than using git from terminal
I mean, you can use Couch, or Redis, or whatever. You'd just have to host the server yourself. And since CORS isn't enabled AFAIK, you'd have to use some kind of hack, like JSONP or whatever.
Can someone ELI5 me what the appeal is to something like Jekyll, seems a lot easier to just setup a Posthaven account (or something similar) given you also get a WYSIWYG.
From my point of view, you're trading ease of editing but gaining speed, security and scalability. If the only thing on the site is static files behind a CDN, it's going to be fast and hard to hack.
Jekyll created static websites, with no database for an attack vector. I learned this the hard way after having a few digital ocean droplets compromised, no backups, etc. Thats one advantage.
"We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service."
Just chiming in to promote this a bit. GitLab is a well-known open source alternative to GitHub, which actually offers more features than GitHub nowadays.
https://pages.gitlab.io/