Hello World
Finding myself with some time on my hands during lockdown and thinking a website revamp was long overdue, I began my new project…
As I’d been pondering a better personal website for a while, I already had a good idea of what I was looking to ultimately achieve - improving my personal brand - the question was how.
The old site was a single static holding page with a couple of links and a background that looked like it was straight out of 2008 (mainly because it was). It was hosted on a EC2 instance that was massively overkill and costing me money.
Considerations for the new site:
- Dirt cheap hosting
- Low-friction article posting
- Really simple design but not based on a theme/template
- Contact form for potential freelance clients
For hosting you can’t get much cheaper and simpler than S3, plus there’s a ton of static site generator options around. But generating and deploying a site every time I want to publish an article seems like a lot of work, plus no contact form ability…
Fortunately I’d already researched using a Lambda function to process a form submission and send an email. So that’s the contact form requirement sorted but what about low-friction article posting?
If I’m using a static site generator I’ll be storing everything in a Git repo, which means GitHub (for me). So I just needed a way to take a repo from GitHub, build a static site and deploy it to S3. Oh and wouldn’t it be awesome if I could automatically trigger that process every time I made a commit!?
After a fair bit of Googling around S3 static site deployments and Lamdbas, I settled on this as a plan:
- Design and build a basic site using Hugo and Bulma
- Provision AWS resources via Terraform
- Deploy site manually to S3
- Create Lambda function to handle building and deployment
- Use GitHub Actions to trigger the Lambda when new content is committed
That should cover all my main considerations and also give me a change to try out some cool new things.
In future posts I’ll cover each of those steps in a bit more detail…