An update - On web hosting

If you’ve read my first post, I mentioned that this site was hosted with github pages. But that has now been migrated to netlify! When I was writing my previous post, I realised that the post tags weren’t working - the clickable link beside the date at the bottom. I spent a few hours debugging a myraid of what I thought could have been the cause, which ultimately ended up being a compatiability issue with github pages.

What this website is, is a static site generated with Jekyll. The tagging system is a ruby plugin for Jekyll, jekyll-seo-tag. Naturally, I went through my code and once I ruled out any issues there, googled for all the permutations of the tools that were being used, searching through github issues with the plugin, googling compatiability issues with github pages, and the plugin gem (yes, ruby libraries are called gems).

Ultimately, I almost gave up. But with a little more persistence, I found the cause of the bug - github pages do not support ruby plugins.

Naturally, I first cursed out loud, then looked at seeing if this could be hosted on netlify (what the author in the issue suggested). And my oh my, it was perfectly seamless. Just clicking a few buttons, as I already had github integration with my netlify account, it was deployed in minutes, with the tagging working!

However, I didn’t think using a custom domain was gonna be easy, so I left it for the night. When I tried it out today, it was amazingly easy and smooth to configure. Easier than github pages! No wonder netlify is so popular. All I had to do was to setup my DNS settings with my hosting provider - CNAME record to point to my netlify app url & A record to point to netlify’s servers. After that, I had to only click a button to generate a SSL cert to enable HTTPS, and I was done :)