Automate GitHub Pages with IFTTT, Glitch and Jekyll

There's a couple different reasons I ended up going with this solution for my site:

1) Most of the time, integrating social networks into your site means either a) using widgets that are hard to work into the main site flow or b) having a backend to pull and integrate social media posts for you. This solution essentially provides B without needing to maintain a backend.

2) When planning my site refactor, Github Pages appealed to me because of its speed and simplicity. This lets me preserve the site automation that would previously have required a CMS, and because the site is static and hosted by Github, I don't need to worry about bandwidth or usage limits.

I'm doing the same thing for a few of my personal tools, and once you get over the instinctive revulsion it's a remarkably nice data flow. For example, I maintain state for an IRC D&D game using a bot that publishes to a github static page after every character-sheet edit. The big win is that I don't have to worry about hosting or availability - the bot only has to be up when the game is in session, the rest of the time, github provides for anyone that wants to look at their character sheet or anything. I do the same thing to maintain an el cheapo bash.org slash bucket [1] for a discord community I'm part of; again, a discord bot is significantly easier to keep alive than a website.

[1] https://github.com/zigdon/xkcd-Bucket

You'd still need a cache, because you shouldn't be hitting the Twitter API every time you load a page. Then you might have to add a frontend cache to avoid having to regenerate the HTML every time. This solution allows you to avoid those two caches while being more efficient, since everything is only generated once.

Azure has been something I've considered for this exact purpose. The PaaS and ARM Templates abstract away IaaS and provides both configuration and secret management.

It should be possible for someone to deploy a Mastodon or Matrix instance via Azure PaaS with no IaaS management necessary. With Kudu's Git triggers, automatic updates might even be possible!

It's no small feat though. It also would require a great deal of ARM JSON which is painful at times.

This seems like too easy a question, but

- WordPress is dynamic, not static, which contributes to:

- WordPress takes more resources to run, and

- WordPress regularly has security holes

- WordPress is therefore not simple because it requires maintenance

- WordPress relies on countless server- and client-side dependencies, which contributes to the maintenance and server requirements

I could be wrong, but I believe WordPress' sharing features are built to share your WordPress posts out to other social networks - this tool is made to do the opposite, to take your posts from other forms of social media and import them as posts on your blog. I don't believe WordPress has that native capability - although it's worth noting that IFTTT natively supports posting to WordPress and other social networks as an action. Previously, my site was on Tumblr and I used IFTTT's Tumblr actions in a similar manner.

In my opinion, the primary advantage Github Pages has over a CMS like Wordpress is simplicity and lack of cruft. WordPress is an extremely powerful tool, but 95% of blogs, mine included, don't need the features that WP provides - and more importantly, the added code and serving overhead that comes with it.

When I've done WordPress development in the past, a lot of customization can be done on the theme level but sometimes you need to adjust the model around which a page is served and it can become confusing and complex with WP's expansive codebase. With Jekyll, it's easy to see every file and how those files combine to create my site pages. It's also easy to serve locally and I can rest assured that Github will build my site in the same manner as it's being built locally.

Finally, I would assert that I have much finer control over my source using Github Pages compared to WordPress - my site, in its native form, is literally a repository which I can move and rebuild on any number of platforms without any backend configuration. And that same repository is automatically open-sourced and built on Github without my having to maintain a build system. I never have to worry about migrating a database, I never have to worry about plugin updates breaking my page, and I never need to worry about PHP vulnerabilities compromising my data. When I look at Github Pages, I feel like GH really managed to abide by KISS principles, saying "what is the MVP for a blogging platform" and providing that in a clean & performant manner.

Do you have a link to this feature/mode?

How would you create the PR from a Tweet?

Yes

Well, for, starters, Glitch is free for unlimited usage :)

Glitch is geared towards people collaboratively working on Node apps (it doesn't support anything else, unlike the other options).

However, it's much easier to get started, with an in-browser code editor, console, and starter projects.

I've been using Glitch to play around with ideas mostly and then I will build locally and deploy to something like Heroku. One other downside of Glitch is that source code is viewable by anyone, which means you probably don't want to launch a side project there.

Note: don't work for Glitch, Heroku, or anyone else mentioned

Upvoted, because there's nothing wrong with this sort of comment, and this and the posts above represent two sides of the same coin--one wants to support, the other wants to tear down, but is shielded behind a veneer of "helpfulness" or "constructive criticism," when in fact it is not.

Complainers complain, and like attracts like. If people want to assert that supportive comments don't "contribute," then knee-jerk downvotes for their own sake are equally unhelpful.