Blog automation

An automation update to philbywhizz.com using Netlify

I’ve been running my website since 2012. Originally I was running Wordpress software for the backend. I found it was slow and cumbersome and to be honest I felt it was a bit risky from hackers (too many moving parts, requires php, with a mysql backend database, and with so many security exploits with vulnerable plugins).

It wasn’t until last year that I came across static site generation and I promptly switched to using Hugo instead. This allowed me to simply edit and add content using simple text files and I can then generate the static site using the hugo command. It was so good, that I also migrated my other sites across as well as mange managing the content easier.

However, there was still a missing piece of the puzzle. I was still having to manually delete and upload the new content each time. What made it more cumbersome was that I had to white-listed my local IP address every 28 days otherwise my scripts would break and I would have to re-list it again. I wrote some hacky ‘deploy.sh’ script that would try and automate this, however it was very brittle. It all just became harder than it should have been

Then I discovered Netlify. It is a host provider that watches my website’s github repository and deploys a new version change has been committed using a simple CI/CD like pipeline. Since I was using github to store my source code anyway I didn’t have to change my workflow. In fact, it reduced a step.

Now my websites update everytime I do a git push to their respective repository - its a thing of automation beauty!

This past weekend I’ve updated the theme for this site to PaperMod which I think is a much nicer and responsive theme. Clean and elegant. Now that it is even easier for me to post up content expect more from me (I’m even retro-posting some things that I’ve missed in the past).

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