Second Static Website

Ent

2020-11-03 23:56

Static Website Hosting

I really like the low footprint and utility of Static Websites. This website is built using Nikola.

In this post I will talk about some issues I faced with deploying a second static website and how I eventually solved it.

Github Pages

I have long enjoyed the awesomeness of User Github Pages and am quite happy with it.

However as soon as I tried to create a second independent static website with custom domain, Github was having nothing of it.

After spending lot of time scouring the web for how to make it work between Github & Namecheap, my DNS provider, I had nothing to show for it.

Netlify

Finally got around to having a look at Netlify and I must say it works great!

It took me a while to understand how to deploy a simple HTML page as I am used to working with tools like Nikola or Hugo.

Artisanal Static Website

In case you want to handroll a static website with pure HTML pages, then here's the trick.

Clean URLs

If you want Clent/Pretty URLS then for each pages you need to have it in a separate sub-directory along with an index.html file.

Let's look at an example:

In case you want to have a site with following URLs:

/
/first
/second
/with-children
/with-children/nested1
/with-children/nested2

Directory Structure

Then you need to arrange your HTML pages in following order.

root
├── index.html
├── first
│   └── index.html
├── second
│   └── index.html
└── with-children
    ├── index.html
    ├── nested1
    │   └── index.html
    └── nested2
        └── index.html

Note that root will point to / folder.

My New Site

You might be wondering what is this new site I have been playing around with.

It's called Easy Zettel and I briefly touched on it in my post Mapping Thoughts

I am working on this as a fun experiment and I intend to write in greater detail about it soon.