Build static site and host at engineering.ably.com

[QuintinWillison]

From @mattheworiordan on this (sent to me via Slack DM, August 2022):

Do you think it’s worth putting a static site generator over this content and hosting on engineering.ably.com. The argument for this is that links are manageable moving forward i.e. if we have engineering.ably.com now and we move to this static site, we can set up redirects for specific pages. If in future we move to another platform or consolidate more of this content somwehere else aagain, we can set up redirects per page. Using a Github repo, we don’t get any of those benefits. Plugging in a static site generator to render Markdown should be trivial, and we could always include the Github icon in the interface to allow people to issue PRs / view the source etc. WDYT

To which I responded with:

I have no objection to publishing to a static site, and there are benefits. My only reason for continuing, for now, with just GitHub-native rendering was the simplicity of it.

[mattheworiordan]

See https://ably-real-time.slack.com/archives/CURL4U2FP/p1672929783408049?thread_ts=1672928918.343459&cid=CURL4U2FP.

Using the default Jekyll powered pages feature of Github, this site is now published to https://engineering2.ably.com as an example of how this can work.

Taking this approach should simplify things in that no static site builder is needed, we can just use the standard Github functionality. What is outstanding is:

• Reassigning engineering.ably.com to point to this pages site (it's currently temporarily https://engineering2.ably.com)
• Set up redirects for old pages on https://engineering.ably.com to https://engineering2.ably.com using rules.
• Ensure all content from https://engineering.ably.com exists in this repo
• Add a very basic Ably header for the static site so that it provides some context to the user arriving at this static site.