After a lot of deliberation and consideration I’ve decided it’s time to push the web-front end further forward for all of my sites. Not happy with just going Static with Hugo, and after many months of pushing local caching as far as I could on NGinx, I’ve finally joined the rest of the web developers from 3 or so years ago. All of my sites are now backed by the Netlify CDN:
Ultimately you just can’t beat a distributed high-performance, low-latency Content Delivery Network. The website tests vary from a 5x to a 11x pageload improvement on average from multiple points around the globe. Locally for me it’s been amazing, but then packets for me generally traverse the Pacific to get to my backyard so that’s not really surprising.
Wishing to have control of my environment (yeah I know) I snagged a OpenVZ 2GB SSD VPS from Hosted Simply for a New Years special of $15USD/yr and built my own Private GitLab repository, then linked that to Netlify. I’m now using a well-known developer workflow with each site it’s own self-contained Git Repository, with the GitLab remote origin mapped to the Netlify CDN with a Webhook for auto-deployment whenever I commit a file to the repo. In addition since it’s Hugo and I want to publish pages into the future, I’ve also added a webhook to trigger a page rebuild periodically.
On the Mac I’m using the passable SourceTree App for Source Control and the awesome Sublime Text 3 for text editing, and on iOS I’m using the excellent Working Copy App with Textastic for text editing. To be honest I feel a lot more in control of what I’m doing now, and being able to run up my changes locally with Hugo, create custom development branches for public/private testing through Netlify and with the ability to rollback changes at the source code level, well, it makes web page maintenance and blogging a lot more like programming.
And as a programmer, I have to say I finally get why so many others do the same workflow. It’s pretty neat :)