blog VS pages-gem

I noticed that after deployment images were broken after further research it became clear that this happens because we are using baseURL with path - https://imomaliev.github.io/blog/. This is known behavior. It does look like a bug to me, but maintainers decided to close this issue as "wontfix" for now. In the future, I am planning to host this blog on my domain without additional path in baseURL, but for now I fixed it by using relative paths instead ones starting with leading /.

I will start from the very beginning and create this blog from the scratch. This series is called "Building the blog while flying it". In the spirit of famous startup quote/approach, "Building the plane while flying it"1. I think I will have a lot of fun. I am going to start by posting to my dev.to page and host blog repository on the GitHub. My first version of this blog is living in the blog-v1 repo.

One day my friend Brandon Boone presented me with a quick and easy way to get a free landing page with a clean subdomain - GitHub Pages.

One of the nicest things about static site generators is that Github is offering a fully integrated solution for free. They manage your files using Git, will build your website using ANY static site generator with Github Actions, and allow you to host the output on Github Pages. When you use Frontmatter.codes in Visual Studio Code you will even get a fully featured (and free) CMS.

The test subjects include Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, and the newly discovered EdgeOne Pages from Tencent Cloud. The measurement indicators include global access latency, Google Lighthouse metrics and the smoothness of the deployment process.

Website Link :https://pages.github.com/

Browser.application is used when you want to support client-side routing. However, it requires you to be able to configure your web server to redirect requests to your index.html file. Since GitHub Pages doesn't allow you to customize their web server, you're forced to switch to another hosting service like Netlify, Render, or Cloudflare Pages. Thankfully, they all make it easy to do the configuration that's needed.

URL: GitHub Pages

The good news is that the deploy process doesn't get more complicated than what I've shown you above. The core concept remains the same. You have branches (say a master branch and several feature branches) in which you use to implement your web application and you have branches (say a staging and production branch) you use for deployment. Then, you have to tell your hosting provider, be it GitHub Pages, Netlify, Render, Cloudflare Pages, or something else, which branches you're using for your deployments.

If one is looking for a simple/personal blog and wants to write in plain-text Markdown, one should consider Jekyll on GitHub Pages[1]. The beauty is that one does not need to worry about setting up Jekyll on the local machine. Just write and push to Github. If one wants to skip that, just go to GitHub and write there; a version of VSCode is built in there.

This also allows one to carry (take out) their content anywhere on any platform that supports plain text (MarkDown). Browsers can also just render plain-text as it, so if you just drag-drop them on a server, it should render as your website.

I have a pretty large personal site[2], and I hate Jekyll because it takes too long to compile locally, but I’m on it because I don’t let it interfere with my writing.

As for a WordPress replacement/alternative, it is going to be pretty hard to find something as prolific and click-clacky easy as WordPress to start off. It has like two decades of the mother of all kitchen sink built-in for anyone to jump in and rummage something out it.

1. https://pages.github.com

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

First I've looked at the tools I was already familiar with. I have some old blog where I've posted updates during my Google Summer of Code projects. It uses Jekyll to generate static files, automatically published by GitHub Pages. It works very well when you have the website tied to a version-controlled repository, but it's cumbersome when you need to rebuild container images or replace files in a remote volume even for small changes

The GitHub Pages splash page (https://pages.github.com/) has a nice little interactive tutorial for just that, and I've seen plenty of repo templates for various SSGs/themes, but I think a lot of users still run into the following hurdles:

- Not knowing what GitHub is or how it works (let alone Git itself)