Since the start of my blog, I’ve been an advocate for GitHub Pages. It allows developers to get themselves a website or portfolio up quickly, for free. However, a lack of a few features from GitHub has left a sour taste in my mouth.
Challenges with GitHub Pages
This isn’t an attack on GitHub or GitHub Pages—it’s an amazing platform used by thousands of developers and companies, and it works well for the majority. However, my skill set is growing, and I’d like to explore other avenues. Think of this as a love letter to GitHub on how they can grow going forward.
DNS / SSL Configuration Issues
The first feature, or perhaps bug, that has gotten to me is the lack of support for using certain DNS products. I personally love using Cloudflare as my DNS provider. It means if I proxy my requests through Cloudflare, I can do things such as automatic image resizing or caching to help the speed of my website or improve my SEO.
This isn’t normally an issue; however, if you proxy your requests through Cloudflare, it confuses GitHub’s automatic SSL certificate renewal. I’ve tried a multitude of different combinations of rules and configurations with no success. If you’ve got suggestions, leave them in the comments!
Limited Plugin Support
Secondly, GitHub only supports certain plugins for static site generators. Luckily, I found a workaround to generate my sitemap or YouTube video embeds, but it would be nice to do this automatically using a plugin. This isn’t really possible with GitHub Pages. Hopefully, this opens up possibilities for new functionality for my blog in the future.
Lack of Request Control and Analytics
While it’s not super important at the moment (I’m only hosting a static website) and even though I’m an advocate for a free and open internet, I would like some more control over what type of requests reach my content. GitHub doesn’t support any sort of request rules, control, or analytics in this space.
Conclusion
So yeah, that’s it. Apologies for my rambling. To clarify, I won’t be moving away from using GitHub as my version control platform of choice. Going forward, I’ll be weighing up my options, so I’ll be all ears to hear your suggestions on where I can move my blog
