How this site is hosted and managed

The technology used to build and manage this website can be distilled into just a few key concepts:

• The main website url is a domain name record purchased from and managed by NameCheap.
• We use a text editor or a web page to write content for the site. The content is just a folder with some files and sub-folders in it.
• We use GitHub (a file version control hosting service) for publishing but it is wholly optional. You can upload the files to our hosting provider for publishing instead of using GitHub if desired.

If you’d like more detal please see the Tech Used FAQ page.

A quick note on the domain name: we used NameCheap to purchse the domain name and followed our hosting provider’s instructions on how to setup the record with NameCheap.

We do not have e-mail or other services setup for the site and the domain setup was very simple and minimal.

For this website, we use GitHub for managing and tracking changes over time.

GitHub is a site designed for programmers by programmers and can be overwhelming. It’s never obvious why people would use the site. It’s because GitHub uses git behind the scenes due to git being a very powerful versioning tool that allows tracking changes to files and folders over time.

We can admit it: GitHub is not the most accessible site for non-programmers. We address this in the below sections.

If you’re wondering why we would fight with GitHub, git and the seemingly overwhelming nature of the GitHub user interface: we desire change tracking and git (the technology behind GitHub) is the most robust tool available for change management as of this writing. We also wanted collaboration tools which GitHub provides as well.

The trick with GitHub is to ignore pretty much everything but the Code, Issues and Edit links.

Change tracking over time can be extremely important, especially when managing a knowledge base. GitHub allows us to have a version history of each page similar to how Wikipedia has a change history link on every page. There is a dedicated link in the Code zone that provides this on GitHub.

GitHub also spent time building robust tools for collaboration between contributors. Specifically the Issues area which allows public discussion of items related to this site. The Issues section is also where users can submit requests and questions to the contributors of this site.

Please see the _ Contributing _ page for additional detail on how we use GitHub for collaboration.

Once you ignore all the programmer specific tools, GitHub starts to make a lot more sense. The items that are relevant to manging this website are:

• The repository is the main URL on GitHub for the project
• The Code section is the files/folders comprising the project
• The Issues section is the location of any to do items that need to be addressesd
• The Edit link is shown on individual files so you can edit them directly in your web browser

By using GitHub we are able to give our contributors and users the following tools and more:

• The git tool for offline development with a text editor
• The GitHub web interface for browser based text editing
• A web based editor that’s tuned to facilitate editing this website with a more graphical user interface
• A way to track issues, questions and submissions related to the site with a focus on collaboration as a group
• A single source of truth for the files that represent the live website

This site is primarily developed using a text editor and file manager with git (KemoNine’s standard workflow).

Each page of the site is a simple text file containing markdown and can be edited with your preferred text editor.

This site also has a web based content editor setup. It is very trim in terms of features and can be somewhat fiddly to use on a phone. Long-term this area of the site will be looked at closer. For now it’s not supported for editing this site.

We even tested editing the contents of this website via the main GitHub website. It works, it’s browser based and a really good option for those that prefer a simple web based text editor environment.

For images and similar content, each of the methods of editing will allow you to add or upload files for use on individual pages.

Please see the _ Contributing _ page for additional detail on content management for this site.

For publishing and hosting we use Netlify. Specifically we are using a free plan with the Identity service (it’s free) for our web editor and Git Gateway service (it’s free) for deployments and updates of the website.

Netlify has two primary deployment and hosting options available for free:

• Uploading zip file containing a static website which they will then host
• Automatically update and deploy your website from a GitHub repo

Both approaches have limits imposed. However, this site and the theme used are very small and not resource intense. We should be able to run this site, for free, for a very long period of time.

We chose to use the GitHub integration via the Git Gateway service as it allows us to better collaborate as contributors and have a single source of truth for the contents of the website that are publicly available for download.

The setup was well documented online and whenever a change gets added to GitHub, Netlify will automatically update the website with the changes. It’s a very hands off, non thinky process outside of the initial setup which was simply pushing one or two buttons in the main Netlify management console.

The manual file upload is a good option if you want to skip the GitHub integration or don’t want to introduce the complexities of git or GitHub to your own setup. We used this deployment model when building a minimum viable website to ensure Netlify was a usable option for us and others who may want to use our approach for themselves.

To maintain the website over time we simply use GitHub and respond to any submitted requests that surface. Editing existing pages is simply editing some text files and adding new pages is just creating a new text file.

Updating and managing the website is a very low brain activity outside of the actual writing. The content writing and copy editing is the most thoughtful part of the maintenance of the site.

All the technological amenities are very hands off and present to help with collaboration, change tracking and copy editing while staying out of the way.

The only downside we have found so far is the GitHub interface overwhelming users and contributors initially. Hopefully the _ Contributing _ page can help bridge this gap for our users and collaborators.