GitHub Pages

At the start of this project, ~/code/actually_random was an empty directory. I had bought ActuallyRandom.com, but there was no Hugo site, no theme, no GitHub repository and no DNS configuration. I opened Claude Code and described what I wanted. Roughly ten minutes of active agent work later, actuallyrandom.com was serving a Hugo blog over HTTPS. It had a theme, search, archives, RSS, Google Analytics and an automatic GitHub Pages deployment on every push to main. ...

I have been running madebynathan.com on GitHub Pages since 2010, and ndbroadbent.com for years after that. In all that time I never verified either domain. I did not know I was supposed to. The custom domain worked, the site was up, and nothing ever complained. Then I set up this blog, went looking for the correct way to attach a domain, and found a settings page I had never opened. What verification actually protects you from GitHub Pages works out which repository to serve by matching the Host header of the request against whichever repo has claimed that custom domain. Your DNS points at GitHub. GitHub looks up who owns the name. ...