Creating this site again: GitHub Pages --- Preliminary


Moving this site to GitHub Pages has simplified costs for this blog site. It allows me to host my blog for free, with minimal maintenance and excellent performance. Previously the site was hosted on Azure Blob Storage with a CDN or FrontDoor delivery of its content. Costs with Azi=ure FrontDoor have gone up of late so it was time to look for a cheaper option. GitHub Pages is a great choice for hosting static sites like this one, and it integrates well with my existing workflow.

This site uses Jekyll, a static site generator, which means that my site is fast and secure. I can easily update my content by pushing changes to my GitHub repository, and the site will automatically rebuild and deploy.

About

This site was originally created 8 years ago (Dec 2018) and has been hosted on Azure Blob Storage and Azure Blob Storage since then. It has served me well, but with the rising costs of Azure FrontDoor, I decided to move to GitHub Pages for a more cost-effective solution. The transition was smooth, and I’m happy with the performance and ease of use that GitHub Pages provides.

The history of this site which has been running for over nearly 8 years and is a testament to the power of static site generators and the flexibility of hosting options available today. I’m excited to continue sharing my thoughts and experiences on this platform for years to come. The history of the site can be viewed on these blog posts here:

The original site was developed as a local Jekyll site, built and tested locally. It was then committed to Azure DevOps and built and deployed using pipelines to Azure Blob Storage. The original guidance for so doing was provided starting from:

Many customizations were made to the original Jekyll site content including making use of various plugins as well a development of custom scripts. The site has evolved over time. At times the pipeline was broken requiring upgrades to later versions of components. Indeed, of late the pipeline has remain broken with DevOPs only being used as a repository. As documented, scripts were developed to build to the site locally and deploy by copying directly to the Blob Store. Various alternatively for copying were developed for copying the whole built site, categories only or just recent changes to the Blob Storage.

Of late, as previously documented, the site was using a CDN front end to provide a custom domain with https access. This was evolved on Azure to the a Classic Azure Front Door. The free Classic Azure Front Door is now deprecated so that was updated to the Standard Azure Front Door. With the rising costs of Azure FrontDoor, I was recommended to move to GitHub Pages for a more cost-effective solution. The transition wasn’t too hard but came with a few caveats.

I started by making a separate local copy of the site contents. I then created a private repository on GitHub for that at djaus2/DavidJones.github.io where djaus2 is my Id on GitHub. When content is reposited to the this site it gets built and made available publicly ashttps://djaus2.github.io/DavidJones. That was then configured to be redirected to a custom domain via a CNAME entry with my domain provider to https://davidjones2.sportronics.com.au. When my Azure Front Door/Blob Storage is removed this new site will be configured to use the same custom domain davidjones.sportronics.com.au.

Nb: I can have a private repository and public site because my GitHub subscription is non-free. With a free subscription, the repository would need to be public to have a public site. ??This probably won’t matter as the content when published is public.??

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