GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages

This is one of my first posts. I have been toying with the idea of this blog for quite some time now. A flaw of mine: too much searching for the best solution, not enough implementing. I end up doing things too late. Anyhow, I digress.

One of the relevant questions when thinking of writing a blog is of course where to publish and what tool(s) to use. At some point, I was thinking of hosting on an old computer of mine. Played with the different servers (compiled Apache, lighttpd and Nginx). Then, I realized all the time involved in maintaining my own server and changed my mind. I did not want to deal with the security updates and the log checking (or the program checking the logs...). Not that I am naïve enough to think my content is worth hacking, but using my machine on a bot net or whatnot might be.

After that, I started looking into shared hosting. That could have worked, I even paid for a few months, but did nothing productive. Was still learning everything and for some reason (a friend of mine would say control issues, but who knows really !), I did not want to go with WordPress, Joomla or another content management system. That seemed like overkill for my needs and yes, I like to control things on my computer a little too much for my own good and I did not feel I could get control over those behemoths in a reasonable timeframe. Most of the shared hosting I looked into (probably not exhaustive) seemed pre-configured for the CMS like systems, but not for other things and I found myself again trying to configure Apache on the shared host.

I gave up for a while. I was busy with other things; but lately, I have been coming back to the idea of this blog. Hence my looking into all those things again. That's when a very good friend of mine suggested I look into GitHub Pages. The idea is very interesting and if someone else is reading this, it means I actually went through with this. I personally have two basic needs for a server: 1) writing a blog (and maybe a private section as a journal) and 2) hosting private projects on Git. With GitHub Pages, I can actually easily create the blog and if I pay for a GitHub account, I believe I should be able to do the private journal and the Git hosting as well. The monthly cost will be roughly the same as a hosted plan and I will have almost zero if not zero administration to do.

So that's how I came to GitHub pages! I am sure that since I am a novice at the Internet (well creating content other then on my Facebook account), there are some assumptions I have made that are wrong and my solution might be sub-optimal, but it works for me.

Now, let's see if I can make a habit of writing.