Github pages are great, but they have one flaw - you have to have a public repo. This meant that I couldn’t really write drafts, or make future edits without the world knowing. I found that this was holding me back from updating my blog.

So today, I moved my site’s repo from Github to Visual Studio Team Services. It’s free, with private repos. Unfortunately, VSTS doesn’t really have a good way to deploy to Netlify (Free static hosting? Yes please), without setting up a convoluted build pipeline that I frankly don’t have the patience to do.

My interim solution is very simple. Write my posts on my local machines, and then use Jekyll via the Windows Subsystem for Linux to generate the static site. After that, simply zip it up and manually drag and drop into Netlify.

I know I can automate this, and I probably will when it starts getting tedious, but for now, it’s good enough. From finishing a new post to publishing takes me less than a minute.

Sometimes the easy solutions are the best.