I wanted to talk briefly about how this site is maintained.

For the last number of years I’ve been hosting this site on GitHub Pages. This is a free product of GitHub that allows someone to host static pages on the internet and has changed over time to include custom domain names and HTTPS with custom names. I have found for my purposes that this provides everything I need.

As a result of choosing GitHub Pages I was introduced to Jekyll which is a static site generation tool that is built into GitHub. Once I got the idea I dove in and moved my publicly hosted WordPress blog to Jekyll. I made some mistakes and didn’t correctly get my images from early posts, but that was just user error and not related to the capabilities of Jekyll.

The main downside to Jekyll is that it is geared towards developers like me. THe entry of blog posts and pages is done in raw html or markdown, and there is a little bit of learning to be done to get the pages to look like you want.

This was no problem for me, and I’ve been happily using it. This last weekend, though, I looked to see if there was a remedy this lack of usability for regular people. I have been looking to use Jekyll and GitHub Pages to host another site that will not always have me editing the content.

What I’ve found, and what I am using right now is a tool called prose.io.

This tool is Jekyll aware and give me a way to create draft posts, use a tool bar for editing the Markdown. Provides a preview and seems to be pretty nice to use.

I’ll keep using it and write later about my experience over time.