Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

This is how the Oil blog is made: it's markdown in git, and it renders fine in Github.

I use a bunch of old Unix tools that will be around forever to make it look nice: http://www.oilshell.org/site.html

The toolchain has changed significantly in 4+ years. It started as literally a shell script invoking Gruber's original markdown.pl. Then I switched to CommonMark, etc.

But the core data hasn't "rotted" at all, which is good. Unix is data-centric, not code-centric.

Previous thread that mentions that Spolsky's blog (one of my favorites) "rotted" after 10+ years, even though it was built on his own CityDesk product (which was built on VB6 and Windows). He switched to WordPress. Not saying this is bad but just interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675869

you do realize you can hot reload and preview in a local browser before deploying? pretty inefficient to deploy just to check your changes

> The toolchain has changed significantly in 4+ years. It started as literally a shell script invoking Gruber's original markdown.pl. Then I switched to CommonMark, etc.

Wouldn't switching formats like that break peoples pages? That's one concern I have with using markdown for a site like this. For anything non-trivial, you either end up using HTML (in which case, what's the point) or some dielect-specific feature.

Setting aside how weary I am of "M$" (it's just about tied with using "sheep" to describe Apple users), what on God's green earth does Microsoft have to do with the OP's point? GitHub itself is not and was never open source. It's not like Microsoft bought it and closed off the source. Do you think using Microsoft tools demonically injects anti-FSF sentiment into your work? ("I started using VS Code, and now whenever I try to work on GPL 3 software, my keyboard becomes too hot to touch until I close the window!")

Personally, I have a different take than the OP, although I'm not sure this is really a disagreement. I would argue open data formats are more important in this context. If I write text in Markdown, it doesn't matter whether I'm using Emacs or a closed-source, proprietary commercial editor; the text isn't tied in any meaningful way to the editor. Likewise, a Git repository hosted on GitHub isn't tied in any meaningful way to GitHub. It's... a git repo.

As long as GitHub isn't doing anything that I particularly object to -- and "oh woe, it is owned by Microsoft" is not an objection I share -- there's a pretty good case for continuing to use it. I'm taking a calculated risk that it's both unlikely to go away anytime soon and to markedly change business direction in an unfriendly way, but if it does? As long as my local copy is up to date, I can re-publish it anywhere and just, well, stop using GitHub.

I've evaluated Netlify for my blog at https://jdsalaro.com and I'd advise against that unless you're missing a CMS on your static site generator. Other than that I personally felt it didn't bring much to the table. I do admit that their CMS is slick, but it wasn't really a feature I needed.

Of course I'm not sure what other people are using them for, but in my case GitLab/GitHub covered all my bases pretty well since I wasn't looking for a pelican/hugo CMS and you still host somewhere else (not Netlify).