I came here to ask why these instructions didn’t just use GitHub pages. Especially since it seems it is targeted toward a person that this is a stretch for, and GH pages would be easier.

So anyway, downtime is one reason I suppose. Are there others?

Another thing I remembered, was the support for newer Jekyll version and plugins. I had everything running locally and it failed on GitHub Pages without any error anywhere. It turned out to be that I need to step back few versions with Jekyll (and I think some Github approved plugins).

I’m fine with that but the lack of error why that is happening was hard for me to assume.

Last year, I moved my site[1] (a pretty heavy content with lots of text files from two decades), and I really like Hugo. It was fast and can compile my site quick enough. Jekyll still crawls but I was ready to live with it as I can just write in MarkDown and don’t worry about compiling every time. However, the downtime was the reason I stopped using GitHub Pages.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

I wish github supported comments on any file in the repository with a preference to turn it off. That alone is sufficient in most cases.

OR

There is a way to make GitHub pages to support commenting by default. Currently, it is a pain to run after third party tools for commenting.

Is it so difficult to make already existing commenting feature to work on pages or regular files?

I use GitHub pages with no build step (GitHub handles that). I use my repos root folder for my page content, starting with index.md. I have a custom domain and just point the a record or cname at my GitHub address or IP. Works great for me and I haven’t noticed a lot of downtime, but I don’t really monitor either.

Edit: It is a little slow to build when you make changes. My changes take a minute or two to appear on the site.

I host my Hugo blogs on S3 at the moment because I wrote a deployment engine that targeted S3 initially. I refactored it recently so that it can deploy pages anywhere, so theoretically I could deploy to GH Pages or anywhere, but S3 works well enough for me.

I seem to recall from my experience that if you want to have a custom domain and subdomain, they can't both be on gh-pages but they can be on Cloudflare.

Don't really remember what the hurdle with gh-pages was though.

I LOVE the IDEA of GitHub pages -- keep the hosting with the source. Simplifies workflows and sync issues. But I find their SSL certs maddenning. They go from working to non working back to working and it is never clear what changed or what the problem is.

I also recently discovered that all our corporate machines show: "MismatchCert (Hostname mismatch) Blocked by SSL_HOST_MISMATCH" on the Github provided certificate. I can only wonder how many people have seen this and didnt visit my site because of it...

Does anyone have a recommended site/guide to setting up simple static sites without technical heroics? In the meantime, WordPress is a saviour.

Hi,

I haven't used GitHub Pages. I use Netlify with Hugo and love it. Super easy, never had any SSL issues. I wrote a guide for this -- apologies if this is self-promotion, I can delete this post if necessary -- the link to my blog is in my bio. I don't think this guide requires "technical heroics", but it depends on your perspective, I guess.