I very recently got around to building this website. Now that it’s up and I’m thinking back on the process, I’m finding myself surprised/pleased that the part that took me the longest was figuring out how I wanted to host the site. I’m sufficiently thrilled with the simplicity and benefits of where I ended up that I wanted to share.

For context, I should first say that my core requirements for a site are very modest. Primarily, I want a site where I can share some professional information about myself and make the occasional blog post to share the ah-has! and general ups and downs of writing software. Secondarily, I wanted to avoid paying anything more than a nominal service fee for hosting the site. And, of course, I wanted to bring normal engineering standards to the process of maintaining the website.

After consider a number of options (eg Django hosted on DigitalOcean), I ended up using GitHub Pages coupled with Jekyll.

This is hardly new or groundbreaking technology and there are already plenty of great tutorials out there, so I won’t talk about any of that except to say that it was very, very easy to get a site up and running.

Instead, I want to share why I personally love this approach:

1. Free (as in no work) Continuous Deployments: GitHub provides tight integration with Jekyll and you get automatic builds and deployments of your site on check-in. As soon as you merge into master, your change is live. Not having to think about building or deploying the site (not to mention maintaining a server) is invaluable.
2. Trivial Site Previewing: Jekyll makes it super easy to preview changes to your website locally before pushing your changes via the jekyll serve --watch command which allows you to view your site on localhost. “Edit and refresh” makes for rapid iterations.
3. Familiarity of Markdown: I’m writing this blog post in simple and familiar markdown which means I really don’t have to concern myself with anything other than the content.
4. Versioned Content: Github makes drafting (and backing up) changes very easy. For example, I made a “feature” branch for this post and I can commit and push to that branch as often as I want. I can take as long as I want to finish the post and have as many in-progress posts as I want without ever worrying about losing them. And all of that happens automatically b/c it is based on my normal development practices.
5. Free: I was willing to pay some nominal amount for website hosting so it’s the icing on the cake that this approach is also free.
6. Jekyll: Jekyll is new to me but the learning curve for doing simple things is not at all steep and my sense is that, if I ever need it, it affords a considerable amount of flexibility and functionality.
7. Simple: Once you’re set-up, doing something like adding a blog post consists of adding a single file with some metadata (date, tile, categories, and tags) and the markdown-based content. Its hard to imagine it being easier.

If you’re thinking about putting together a website or already have one and are experiencing any pain in maintaining it, I highly recommend this approach. As someone who was already using GitHub, it’s been a 100% friction free experience for me as it dovetails perfectly with the tool sets and development habits that I already have. Create your website using standard tools and everything else happens automatically and painlessly.