I’ve been a big fan of static site generation since I switched from WordPress to Jekyll back in 2018. I’m also a big fan of learning new technologies as they come along, and now GitHub Actions are out in the wild; I thought this would be an opportunity to see how I can port my existing custom CircleCI build to Jekyll.

A quick recap from part 5 — Hosting & Building, my CircleCI configuration was basically two jobs that have subsequently been tweaked since then. They are:

My site goes back to 2004 and is reasonably sized but not massive even with the comments, so waiting 30 seconds for a change to reflect is disappointing.

I investigated several options and ended up using a few in combination, skipping others and holding out for one.

The next stage is considering where to host the site and whether to use a content delivery network (CDN). My preferred approach on other sites has been to:

Adding the CloudFront CDN was essential if you wanted SSL with your domain name, but GitHub pages added support for SSL certs with custom domains

Jekyll does support categories and tags directly but doesn’t support the pagination of categories and tag list pages. The Paginate-v2 gem does solve this — and also lets you tweak the URL format.

My site used the URL formats /blog/category/{category-name}/blog/category/{category-name} and /blog/tag/{tag-name}/blog/tag/{tag-name} with 4 articles per page and a little pager at the bottom offering some indication of what page you are on, and some navigation arrows like this:

Site search is a feature that WordPress got right. Analytics also tells me it is popular. A static site is at a disadvantage, but we have some options to address that.

My first consideration was to use Google Site Search alas it was deprecated last year. There are alternative options, but few are free. I agree that people should be paid for their services, something has to keep the lights on, but a small personal blog with no income stream can’t justify this cost.

I do enjoy discussion and debate, whether designing software or writing articles. Many times the comments have explored the subject further or offered corrections or additional insights and tips. They are vital on my blog, and I was disappointed that Jekyll provides nothing out of the box to handle them.

Third-party solutions like Disqus exist that require you either pay a subscription or have ads inlined with the comments. That $9/month adds up. The alternative of injecting ads onto my blog to support comment infrastructure doesn’t sit right with me.

It’s hard to believe it was 13 years ago, back in a cold December on the little island of Guernsey, when I decided to start blogging. I’d had a static site with a few odd musings since 2000, but this was to be more regularly updated and with technical content. Blogspot seemed the easiest way to get started.

Within 18 months of regular blogging, I’d moved over to Subtext, which, being a .NET app, required Windows hosting, so I threw it on a small Shuttle PC on my home DSL. I started using it as an experiment for CSS and web techniques but, within a year, I’d had my 1MB DSL brought to its knees twice through articles featured on BoingBoing.