I’ve been doing a variety of things pertaining to web security in recent weeks and one thing that’s been gnawing at my brain is the fact that my blog could still only use insecure http:// because of GitHub Pages. My blog’s content was using GitHub Pages for its serving and gh-pages really hasn’t been seeing a lot of love - that I know of - since its inception a few years back, especially since the development of concepts like Let’s Encrypt with free SSL certs for the web.
I felt I probably should have taken a more active role, perhaps running my own server and all that, but I really don’t want one more vector to have to secure. So, I asked around. Turns out the fantastic (not paid to say it) Netlify offers hosting for static sites, with continuous deployment support and HTTPS from Let’s Encrypt…for free.
After a short stint stabbing around in the documentation, I set about rewriting my blog installation setup to use requirements.txt for Python over using Buildout, thus greatly simplifying my blog setup. The significant upshot of having continuous deployment is now I can edit content on GitHub from any platform and have my blog auto-rebuild itself through the magic of webhooks. GitHub notifies Netlify and they rebuild and publish. That’s great — I no longer need to be the man-in-the-middle, rebuilding and shuttling my blog’s HTML to different places — I just push reStructuredText and that’s that.
The blog and site are now HTTPS-only after a couple of quick corrections to the naive HTTP-only blog theme I was running. Easily solved with find-and-replace.
If you’re still running a HTTP website, it’s time to make the switch.
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