My website once was an ASP.NET MVC website that was very full featured. I realised that most of the features weren't actually being used and I wanted to free up some spacing on my webhost.
This lead me to start investigating alternatives to blogging platforms. Wordpress seemed a little over the top and I didn't want to have to manage the website and server myself. I wanted to be able to quickly and easily publish a blog post when I (rarely) want.
I started looking into GitHub pages, and it was great and had free hosting on custom domains. It lead me to Jekyll and static built websites. However there were two downsides:
- The source code to the site was entirely open. Not that this really matters since there's no sensitive information contained within it, it's just not the greatest.
- It doesn't allow for plugins and collections aren't supported. It appears to be running a version of Jekyll prior to 2.0 when collections were added.
Enter Heroku, where those two issues were addressed.
I had a bit of trouble transitioning the site to run on Heroku (I'm not a Ruby dev and haven't paid too much attention to these technologies). I ended up following this article, however there was one issue with it. I followed "Method 1" since "rack-jekyll" required Jekyll <2.0, which brought me back to point 2 above. The only change to what's in that article is what goes in the Procfile
file. Instead of:
1web: bundle exec jekyll --server -p $PORT
It should be
1web: bundle exec jekyll server --port $PORT
And that's it. All the rest is valid. This website is now entirely static content. I even started using Amazon's CloudFront for hosting media files, more for the fun of it than because of traffic.