After 2 years at Brown, I could no longer avoid hacking together a semi-permanent site to archive and host work that I want to be available to others. There were a few options that I considered:
- Building a server in Rails for me to post in. (Overkill)
- Hosting raw HTML pages myself or through Brown (brittle, and temporary)
- Using a prebuilt hosting service, such as Google Pages or Wix (probably limiting in terms of interactivity and front-end development)
Fortunately, I found (at the suggestion of a peer) GitHub Pages, which allows static/frontend site hosting using GitHub (for free). GitHub has support for Jekyll, a static-page generator that eases templating, cross-linking, and RSS feed creation. Jekyll supports content in a variety of markup languages, including markdown and html. One could imagine implementing a backend using a separate service for more complicated apps, but these technologies seem to be more than sufficient for personal site management. I found this introduction to be quite helpful.
Thanks,
- (S)am