Moving to Netlify

I've now moved my site over to Netlify. Having hosted it, at least in part, on Nearlyfreespeech for the best part of 15 years, I have decided to go fully serverless. This is not a slight on Nearlyfreespeech, I have had only positive experiences on Nearlyfreespeech and they will continue to host some legacy files of mine. The main reason for this switch is because I started using Eleventy, a static site generator, to build my site. This is great, it lead to much faster load times. But it meant I had to be on my personal laptop to update the content. I couldn't use an online service to update the site, like I could previously with Wordpress. At least not without a lot of extra effort and technical skills I don't really have. Sure I could create my content in GitHub, but to build and publish the site I needed to run the scripts that were on my laptop.

So I started looking for alternatives and decided to finally give Netlify a go. I created a Netlify account, linked it to my GitHub repository and within 3 minutes had created and published my site on Netlify. I then switched the DNS of my domain to Netlify's and after a few hours to allow for the new nameservers to propagate my site was fully live on Netlify. Fantastic. A few more minutes later I updated a post, committed it to GitHub and it was live within seconds. Just brilliant! I'm impressed. I still don't have a CMS to manage my content, but then my site is simple and it's just me editing it, so GitHub is good enough for that. Note to self: checkout Stackbit.