I’m Back
I more or less disappeared from this site for more than a year. I’m back. I dusted off the site and figured out how to move my site to Netlify.
Netlify and Blogdown
Switching to Netlify to host this blog was a bit tricky. It’s always harder to do something when you don’t know what you’re doing. I was a bit shaky on the relationship between Netlify and Github. When I was serving the site via johngoldin.github.io I was using blogdown to create my site in a local public folder and then using git to upload the contents of the public folder to the johngoldin project on Github. With Netlify, I mirror my local blogdown repo with the Github repo. But I do not need the contents of my local public folder. In fact, I can add public to .gitignore. I point Netlify at my Github blogdown repo and it knows to use Hugo to process the site and build the public folder that it will serve on the web. Very soon after I push my blogdown changes to Github, the final html site appears at Netlify.
There is an advantage and a disadvantage to this workflow. Before I would build my site locally. Then I had to switch to the project that contained the public folder and push that to Github. With Netlify, after I push my local blogdown project to Github my site is automatically rebuilt on Netlify. That saves a step. The disadvantage is that pushing my blogdown project always updates my live blog site. I need to check the site locally to see whether I am satisfied before doing a push to Github. If I weren’t paying for Netlify they would give me the ability to have a test site on Netlify where I could explicitly decide when I was ready to publish to the live site. Given that I have a readership of about one, that degree of control isn’t necessary. Also, there is a option in Hugo (or blogdown?) to mark a post as “draft.” The post appears on my local viewer, but is not part of the Hugo build on Netlify.
I also went ahead and rented www.johngoldin.com and told Netlify to use it. So far the principal advantage I get from using Netlify is the ability to redirect to a different place to serve my site. I suppose that renting johngoldin.com accomplishes something similar. OK, let’s face it; I don’t really have a good handle on why Netlify is an advantage for someone like me. But Yihui recommends it.
What now?
I have been doing a lot of bits and pieces of code at home. I plan to write up some of that here. Given that I have been writing an occasional personal journal for most of life, the idea of writing a blog that nobody reads doesn’t seem strange to me. And maybe I will include some useful bit that someone will actually discover via a Google search. A lot of the tips that I have gotten on R (and sometimes on travel) have come from that kind of writing.