I’ve had a personal profile page up for several years at this address. It was a static site generated with Jekyll and hosted for free on GitHub pages. GitHub pages will even generate Jekyll sites automatically for you. The source is still available in my GitHub jaywcarman/jaywcarman.github.io repo. All of this was easy to set up and keep running. For what it was it worked perfectly.

I decided that I’d like to start writing some technical blog posts. In doing so I would be interacting with the site much more often (hopefully 🙂), and so I re-evaluated the tools that I was using. Though Jekyll and GitHub pages worked fine I was ready to do something different and learning something new.

I ended up choosing another static site generator:

and another free hosting service:

I’ve also made a few more decisions to maintain future flexibility, in case I ever want to move this site to a different hosting service:

  1. I own my domain

    I own the carman.us.com top level domain and am free to configure DNS records as I please. This allows me to move the back-end around to services like GitHub pages, Sourcehut pages, or even self-host on the server at home in my closet – all without changing the site URL.

  2. I use build tools that are portable

    I use make to define my build process. This allows me to:

    • Run locally
    • Run anywhere that has (or can install) make - pretty much anywhere!

    If I want to use something like (GitHub Actions)6 I simply use it to set up the build environment and then call make

That’s it! Feel free to check out the entire site source here.