I spent a little while this weekend moving this blog from Ghost to Zola, and therefore also moving the hosting from Digital Ocean to GitHub Pages.
Why? It’s pretty simple, really - I don’t need a server-side process rendering my blog. Ghost seemed like an interesting platform when I first used it, five-ish years ago, but it also appears to have pivoted since then and is now focused a lot more on “creators” and “engagement” and so on - providing tools for people who have a large audience and are trying to earn money from their writing. Indeed, their headline is now “Turn your audience into a business.”
Given the number of posts I’ve made (cough), that’s pretty clearly not something I have a need for right now, and may not ever need, unless I take a sharp right turn into writing as a career.
On top of that, because Ghost requires a NodeJS server-side process, I have to deal with the following:
- Monthly payments (small, but not zero)
- Keeping the VPS up-to-date with security patches/etc
- Keeping Ghost up-to-date
It’s not a lot of work, but it also should be done even if I’m not actively posting blog posts, and I’d much prefer something where none of the above is necessary. Ghost does provide a hosted option, for example, but even the lowest tier is US$9/month.
So why GitHub Pages? It provides a completely free way to serve this blog which meets all of my really very simple needs:
- Publish some HTML
- Let me use my own domain
- HTTPS
- No server or platform maintenance
- Free or extremely cheap
Am I over the moon about adding another bit of the web that’s reliant on GitHub? Well… no. But since I’m migrating off of Ghost as a platform, I need to look for another tool to actually, y’know, make a website.
Obviously, anything that needs to actually run code in response to a request is out - so no WordPress, nothing like that. GitHub Pages, by default is, by default, powered by Jekyll. However, I’m not a fan of Jekyll just because it’s build in Ruby, and that means having to deal with installing Ruby, managing Gems, and god forbid I install another Ruby-based tool that needs incompatible Gems or something. And yes, there are tools to work around all of that but since I’m not already in the Ruby system, I’d really prefer something that’s just a single, drop-in binary.
The other advantage of these tools is that I have everything stored in Git,
in Markdown, and so migrating elsewhere is just a matter of running the
generate command of whichever tool I’m using and uploading the resulting
files to the host. So if GitHub starts looking dodgy, it’s about as easy as
it can be to migrate.
So the next step, then, was picking the tool I’d use to generate this blog. There are plenty of static site generators out there, and it was to some extent a matter of excluding the ones I didn’t like for increasing arbitrary reasons until I had just one left:
- Nothing in Ruby, NodeJS, Python, etc - I want a single binary and don’t
want to wind up in Gem hell or
node_moduleshell or whatever (this excludes a lot already), and I’m probably going to use this on Windows quite a bit so the experience should be reasonable there. - Must have basic support for non-blog pages (like an About page)
- I’d like to be able to at least pretend that I could enjoy contributing to whichever tool I’m using and I’m a bit of a language snob - I love Rust and dislike (but don’t hate) GoLang, for example.
The end result of that was that I chose Zola. It’s a static site generator, with a single binary and is written in Rust. It’s very simple to use, and while it might not be as full-featured as older tools like Jekyll jekyll, it’s more than enough for my needs.