Project: Setup a free and simple static website for your blog
Lessons learnt from taking Further North to a static website.
Further North blog is running on a static HTML site. This post will explain why I am using a static site, how my setup began with a complex chain of steps and ended up with a simple elegant structure I am very satisfied with.
Why run a static website, and why not use WordPress like 70% of the internet sites?
The answer is simple. That’s the answer, its simple. Creating and maintaining a WordPress site still is time demanding, high maintenance and costly. In contrast, my simple static web site is a collection of pages I can create and edit offline anywhere, and publish from my ipad, from whatever wifi enable cafe I may be in.
It’s also free. I was happy paying $5 monthly for my own website hosting space, but for my really small website I found that using postach.io web service was free, and it has all the Google search visibility and security matters covered by their tech team. Over at Panthur my domain registry, I setup URL Redirection, which cloaks the postach.io sub Domain, so that visitors to furthernorth.net.au are redirected painlessly to furthernorth.postach.io
And I can use Evernote to compose blog posts, which is my daily go-to note taker anyway. No learning time needed. All the formatting tools I need are there: bold, italic, check boxes, tables and even image embedding. It’s simple.
I also like to take the road less traveled. 🙂
How did I get here?
My web presence started with a WordPress site. There was a agonising trawl through so many themes to find one that I could understand. Then wrestling with Menus, Pages, Sections and Plugins took up many hours that were really non-productive.
I began to see the light of static websites with Hugo. Hugo is one of the new static site generators that builds pages lightning fast and creates HTML files that you just upload to your web host. I added Forestry.io as my simple Content Management System (CMS). And I discovered Netlify was an Indy developers paradise where you could get connect your site for immediate hosting. Maybe I don’t need my own web host after all?
Enter Github to the stage. This is where the developer geeks all hang out. You can have a virtual desk on Github to develop the next Facebook project and collaborate with like minded geeks anywhere on the planet. But to really fly here you have to understand a new vocabulary of version control, pull requests, and commits. I could see a rising learning curve ahead, and I have not written much worthy of publishing yet.
My first static blog pipeline looked like this:
for collecting ideas, notes and clippings, drafting post. Evernote https://evernote.com is my favourite note taker. To
To
To
https://www.netlify.com publishing my blog to the internet with the custom domain name furthernorth.net.auPhew! At last all setup. But what have I created? It’s a very complex arrangement of platforms, and I have lost focus on why this is all setup. I have stopped writing stuff.
A new day has dawned with 
https://postach.io is an Evernote Powered Blogging platform. It allows me to simplify my blgging pipeline to just two steps: create in Evernote, and Publish on postach.io
for drafting blog posts, add a tag "Published" and converts all to HTML and posts it to the internet.That's it! Simple, elegant, and not straining my brain.
Now I am writing again..
Check out my blog for yourself here:
Or
