Move site to github pages

[CodeFoodPixels]

The current website is a Ghost blog on a digitalocean instance. This isn't a hugely easy way for anyone to get involved and the current site hasn't been updated in years.

To make the website more collaborative, we should move the site to github pages. That way anyone can make updates to the site and it's a more collaborative way to work.

We should also ensure that pictures of the organisers are on there so that attendees know who to speak to if they have any issues.

[wheresalice]

I've done a few migrations to github pages recently, I'm more than happy to help with this but I'm not great at design so a little assistance in making it look good would be appreciated.

The one issue with Github Pages though is the lack of SSL for custom domains. I've been running a few sites on Netlify recently to overcome this, which also opens up the possibilities to use something other than Jekyll and something other than Github.

[simoneduca]

Is SSL really needed in this case though?

[mansona]

Not quite GitHub pages but it is statically generated from markdown files in Github 🎉 https://github.com/LeedsJS/leedsjs.com

currently have it live on http://www.leedsjs.com for review

let me know if you want to discuss 👍

[CodeFoodPixels]

I have 2 reasons for wanting to move it wholesale to GitHub pages:

1. Ease of collaboration
2. Ease of deployment

Having a site hosted elsewhere somewhat defeats the 2nd point as people need to have access to that live environment.

On the HTTPS note, we definitely should have it. HTTPS ensures that anyone using the site has a private connection and ensures the connection cannot be intercepted and have malicious content injected.

My personal site is hosted on GitHub pages and uses HTTPS through Cloudflare, I wrote a guide as to how I did that here: https://lukeb.co.uk/2018/01/02/HTTPS-With-A-Custom-Domain-On-GitHub-Pages/

Also of note, my site isn't using Jekyll but uses Hexo as a static site generator. This is generated using Travis-CI when I push to the master branch on the https://github.com/lukeb-uk/website-hexo repo and then a pull request is sent to the https://github.com/lukeb-uk/website where it's hosted from.

[CodeFoodPixels]

I missed the bit where you said it's statically generated @mansona, so I don't think there's any reason we couldn't go with this approach and hook it up to github pages really. Will have to have a play around with it later.

[mansona]

So I guess the main point here is "why" you are interested in getting it on github pages? From my perspective it's just going to be compiled static somewhere and it might as well be anywhere (S3, Google Cloud Platform)

I am planning to add a deploy step on travis so that when anything is committed to master on https://github.com/LeedsJS/leedsjs.com it will automatically push to wherever it is hosted. It is also using ember-cli-deploy so it should be easy enough to migrate elsewhere if it's a problem in the future.

I'm not against using github pages (and it's ultimately your decision anyway) it's just that there are some other concerns that cause problems when pushing static SPA sites like this to something like github pages.

Might be worth having a quick lunchtime call to chat about it if you're interested?

[simoneduca]

(@lukeb-uk thanks for sharing your https guide, it helped me!)

[mansona]

Howdy folks 👋 me again 😂

Ok so I've done the thing I was saying about making this "auto deploy" when you push to github 🎉 It's currently on my company AWS but I had a look and it turns out that S3 and CloudFront are supported on the "free tier" for AWS 🎉

I don't know if you got a chance to check this out @lukeb-uk but I'm pretty happy on how it's turning out so far 😄

[mansona]

Howdy folks 👋

More updates for you on the progress of this! I have upgraded the ember-casper-template system so that now it pre-renders each of the blog posts and a few of the other pages so it is super fast and SEO friendly 🎉

You can see this now by going to http://www.leedsjs.com/new-horizons-old-friends/ and hitting "View Source" in your browser of choice. You'll see that the whole HTML is rendered up-front 🎉

I have also been having conversations with the creator of the pre-rendering plugin I'm using and apparently this setup is 100% ok to be used as Github Pages hosting. If that's the main blocker I can go spend a bit of time getting that part working but from my perspective, an AWS free tier system should be good enough (as I mentioned above) 👍

Let me know if anyone has any questions

[CodeFoodPixels]

Just to keep this thread updated, Chris has pointed the LeedsJS domain at this new site. It's currently pointed at an AWS box that Chris' company is paying for, but I'm going to be looking at setting it up to be hosted on GitHub pages. I will likely look at setting it up in a similar way to my own site, detailed in this post: https://lukeb.co.uk/2017/11/12/New-Website/