Consider alternatives to GitHub Pages

[handrews]

GitHub Pages has several very problematic limitations for a project focused on HTTP standards:

• It does not allow setting Content-Type except via file extension, which is not how our schemas work
• It does not support HTTP redirects, only HTML-driven refresh-redirects

The first two are essential for us, as we want to have our JSON Schemas served as JSON, and we want to have a latest resource that uses redirects instead of serving a schema with a mismatched $id (this helps prevent people from thinking that the latest URI can be used in $refs, etc.).

Netlify seems to be the most popular suggestion on our Slack, with @jmertic having seen it used for similar purposes and at least one other person recommending it. I've also seen Cloudflare Pages used. Both can run from GitHub repos, and I'm pretty sure both can solve both of our main problems. The distinction might be which has the most services available through any sort of open source foundation-oriented plan (I believe both have or at least once had such plans), which I have not investigated at all.

[handrews]

Also, jekyll and liquid frustrate everyone endlessly AFAICT. We'd have much better sites in a better system.

[lornajane]

I'm very much in favour of choosing a different/better platform. I'd like to note that learn.openapis.org does also use Jekyll.

[handrews]

@lornajane yeah spec.openapis.org, learn.openapis.org, and tools.openapis.org are all GitHub Pages/Jekyll/Liquid. While the frustration is most acute with the spec site, it's a problem for the others as well, just in terms of the flexibility of layout and who is able to work on them.

[SensibleWood]

@handrews @lornajane tools.openapis.org doesn't use Jekyll, it uses Eleventy with Nunjucks. Really easy, JavaScript based, removes the need for any Ruby based hoo-ha.

Not especially wedded to GitHub Pages. Used Netlify before, seems good especially given supports a promotional model which is always a good thing IMHO.

[handrews]

@SensibleWood oh good to know! That explains why the tools site can have that nice panel layout. It never occurred to me to check for some reason.