Hello world!
Hello world!
I’m now transferring my blog from Wordpress into Github pages —the former site will be deleted soon. So, if you cannot access this link anymore, then that means I have already done the deed. It seems that I have some pretty popular articles in my Worpress site, so perhaps I’ll start migrating them here.
Here are some reasons why I decided to go for Github pages:
- Integration to my dev workflow. I have been using Git extensively, and I
enjoy versioning my work. That also includes pushing/pulling changes to my
remote, and practicing continuous integration or deployment. Github pages
enables me to do just that: I just need to push to
master, and my page will be deployed in no time. I can also work offline, and push upstream changes to my repository. In summary, I just want a “hack-ish” user-experience. - I want to try some web development. Web developers may scoff at what they just read, but migrating to Github Pages enabled me to learn a bit of web dev. Even with just a static site generator like Jekyll, I was able to dip my toes on the Rails ecosystem, SCSS, and the like.
- Open-source experience. I realized that if readers found any mistakes, either from grammar or content, they can just go ahead and open up a Pull Request. They don’t need to point them out in the comments and wait for me to correct them myself. Github integration is pretty good, and I’d love to leverage that1.
On the other hand, there are still some things that may need some improvement:
- Plugins require setup. For Wordpress, I just virtually need to drag and drop plugins I want to have. SEO and Analytics are automatically available. With Github Pages, I need to setup Disqus for comments, Google Analytics for stats, and other things. Github pages doesn’t support plugins out-of-the-box, so if I want to do that, I need to push the locally generated files instead 2.
- No databases, etc.. That’s definitely expected, especially on static-site generators. If you want the full blogging experience, I’d say stick to other services for that. If you want a clean and lightweight experience, then Github pages is a good solution for you.
With that in mind, I won’t suggest Jekyll + Github Pages for non-developers who don’t want to roll-up their sleeves and tinker around their site. If you want an easy and no-ops way of blogging, use other providers such as Medium or Wordpress. But, if you find joy in building things and making things work, then Github pages is definitely the best solution for you!