Websites

Written Feb 9, 2023, tagged under post

The approach I've set up for this website has been working really very well indeed. Now obviously I'm a developer-type, slightly techy kind of person so I would say this. But, adding a new blog post as I'm doing now is pretty straightforward. I open a text editor, add some dull boilerplate at the top with titles etc, then just keep typing.

I use Typora still for editing the pages - it is good for typing in markdown and seeing roughly what you'll end up with. The only thing I really struggle to remember is how best to include images - that's a bit of not-quite-intuitive typing, because the path to the image isn't the same in my editor compared to the site, so I have to set it up "blind".

If I want a new image, I find Unsplash does a great job of coming up with some nice images. I try to attribute them when I can, and in fact ought to try to build this into my site theme, for simplicity.

The way that search works I'm extremely pleased with. When the site builds, the search index is also updated and passed into Netlify without me really having to do anything. So adding a page is just: type - save - build. Once I'm happy with how it looks, I then push it up to Netlify and everything is rebuilt there within a few seconds.

I'm thinking about this because I've been making some changes to Ellie's yoga website. That one is also using Jekyll, but the deployment is rather less streamlined. We pay for a Linode instance, and I need to push the changes there and then manually rebuild on the server. Also, it actually means running a server, keeping it up-to-date and patched etc.

I'm thinking about moving that one over to Netlify too. To that end, I would like to take my work on this blog and turn it into a template allowing a site to be set up, deployed to Netlify, complete with server-side search and so on. This is on my todo list!

(Sadly, I keep letting sleep fall off the same list. When will I ever learn?)