Improving the publishing workflow

In my previous posts I mentioned how I tried out Netlify CMS, but then chose not to go down that route. So I kept looking for other options. My aim being to do as much as possible in one place, whilst avoiding as little lock-in as possible.

I discovered cloudcannon and checked out how I can make use of that. In the end it wasn't for me, but it had one feature which prompted a rethink. It has output syncing, which copies your static files to another "Live" repository if you want. I tried this out and it worked great. Pointing Netlify to this live repository significantly reduced the Netlify build times. Since I am on the Netlify free plan with limited build minutes, this seemed like a good idea.

But how to build my static files without cloudcannon or getting Netlify to do so. Well GitHub has actions and there is an action created by another user to build eleventy sites. So I got that working.

Then I remembered that GitHub also has "Pages" for hosting static websites. So I thought if I am already building my static files to "Live" repo on GitHub, why not use GitHub Pages to host them. Setting that up was quite straightforward without using a custom domain. So now I have my pages hosted on GitHub pages and edited through forestry.

The final thing to do is to update the DNS settings so that I can use my own domain name. Once I have done this, I can potentially remove Netlify from my publishing workflow. This is a shame, because I liked their product and service. But if I can manage this through GitHub that would be one less tool I need to interact with.