CK’s Technology News migration to GitHub

Here some news about my website and the current status for those who are interested what I’m doing in my ‘free’ time. Well basically reading, reading and coffee drinking. Besides my daily routine, I always try to improve my Blog and my articles however, I was never really happy with WordPress and so I decided about 2 months ago to migrate to GitHub. I’m mostly 80% of my free time anyway on GitHub pushing commits, talking with others about interesting things I like and what I think could be improved. So the migration to the biggest source code platform is not really a surprise for those who’re following me.

Why GitHub as hoster for my Blog?

Well, first of all, it’s free. Second I’m almost the entire day or at least one Browser Tab anyway on GitHub, no matter what. I’m personally clearly not a GitHub fanboy, I was already years ago asking myself if I should not make the switch to platforms which aren’t “spying’ like GitLab but GitHub became in the meantime so powerful that I continued to use it even if there is no need to because most things are already working on BitBucket or GitLab exactly the same way. I must admit I’m not the youngest anymore and I have troubles ‘changing my old habits’. Even when GitHub started censorship me and my content (several times) I stayed loyal over the last years and I even purchases two paid membership subscriptions for two different accounts in order to separate business from private accounts.

What does the change mean for my readers?

Well, I try to keep it short:

• No Ads, I might only activate Google Analytics but besides this, there are no external connections to any other services.
• The Website is a static page, which means new content needs to be pushed via git, this gives you the ability to look behind my work. You get automatically a changelog with each change/push. Overall spoken it’s more transparent but more work (for me).
• A clean design. I try to keep the focus on text and some article pictures, no gimmicks because page speed is for me really important and for you as a viewer also something interesting because you like your news delivered fast.
• GitHub is more or less reliable, their crypto-system is strong and this means I do not need to take care of anything (overall less work for me).
• Everyone (yes, even ‘free’ account users) can create a Blog on GitHub with ZERO costs.
• Content control. I like to take control of the content and in case something happened I have several revisions (backups) directly hosted on GitHub or local on my storage.
• There will be a comment system, most people using Disqus these days but you must trust them because they store the data – so I decided to use something which gives more control over the content/comments, I found staticman a good alternative because I do not need to monitor any comment manually, it’s protected with reCAPTCHA’s. Every comment goes to GitHub, will be automatically checked and then automatically approved.
• The new website uses Markdown language instead of HTML which is easier for me, I like markdown, it’s not perfect but you easier work with it without going through the HTML/CSS clusterfuck.
• You could provide patches (pull requests) if you find something on the page, which would help you and me to stay more secure and everyone gets a benefit from it. You as a visitor get a stable and secure platform and I don’t need to keep an eye on this and can write articles – which should be my focus anyway.

The no forum policy stays. I’m not really interested in forums anymore and I see them as a dead horse, these things are like ICQ and IRC on a sinking ship while ‘everyone’ is using Discord & Co. I see still no reason to change this, even if I would magically change my mind the GitHub wouldn’t allow this.

Sounds good what are the odds?

Since I’m behind a free WordPress plan I have no access to my entire data because I don’t have full access to everything (it’s limited and only business plans can get ‘root’ access). I already asked WordPress to workaround this and they might provide me with the needed data such as all comments and pictures. That said, it’s unclear if I can get my posts/comments and domain as the backup or not, WordPress currently reviews the process and we might find or might not find a solution.

In the worst case, this means I can’t integrate my content into the new page. However, I see this as less critical as it might sound because I could copy it manually but that would take forever (but overall it would be possible).

Another thing is that I never really worked with Ruby which is required now in order to work with Jekyll. This probably will require the entire summer until I’m really ready to do some real work with it, I’m really slow in learning new things these days…

Due to these changes, I will not post as many articles as I would like to. Keep this in mind before you start email’ng me with questions ‘why is there no new content?’. I’ll also take a short vacation this summer to chillax a little bit which means I already wish all of you guys a fantastic summer and I guess we will see us on ‘the other side’ with a hopefully a better blog and a faster page.

Closing Words

Once everything is finished I will make the announcement here, so don’t worry you will not miss anything here I promise.

CK  

Update

I still will post some small articles and updates when I have time. My dispute with GitHub is not settled and GitHub faces a lawsuits because they contradict themselves a lot, in the meantime I switched to GitLab.