Old Site, New Home
The site looks largely the same, but under the hood there have been some very big changes. There have been some more visible changes too, for example you can now browse by series or bookmark this url which will always show the latest blog post. Other than some minor cosmetic changes, everything else should be pretty much the same to anybody visiting the site.
For me as a developer though, I’m very excited about what’s new; the site was previously written using Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages, and now it’s written with Hugo and hosted on AWS Amplify. I made some quality of life improvements
in the migration, most notably merging my two blogs into one with a proper time-based directory structure, meaning I no longer have 900-odd files in a single /_posts/ folder.
I’ve also got a proper taxonomy system in place with categories, series and tags, something I never got working out of the box with Jekyll, the consensus being that its “collections”
aren’t great anyway. The site now takes around 5 seconds to build from a cold start, as opposed to a brutal 100+ seconds on Jekyll, which made live-reloading pointless and any
attempts at meaningful development frustrating to the point of impossibility. Hugo isn’t just faster than Jekyll though, it’s also more powerful and feature-rich, and while I feel
like I have made a decent first exploration of what’s possible with Hugo, in the future I plan on digging deeper to see what else I could use it for on this site.
Hosting on AWS brings with it so opportunities for feature expansion and development too. It is worth noting that I am now paying something for hosting, which I wasn’t previously with GitHub Pages, but by my back-of-the-napkin maths, my bill for Amplify will be less than $0.01/month, which I think I can live with. I can see requests related to server-side metrics, so I at least have some idea of how many people are visiting my site, as I still don’t have any kind of client-side analytics, and I plan to keep it that way. The CI/CD options are largely the same as with GitHub, but the thing I am especially excited for is being able to have other services integrate with the site - for example, a CloudWatch alarm that fires a lambda function at a certain time every day, which checks to see if there is a new post on the site, raising an event to an SNS topic if there isn’t, which then emails me to let me know. Or even a lambda that simply posts for me. There are a million other possibilities with the AWS serverless stack, the only limiting factor is making sure that they don’t end up costing me a fortune in the meantime.
Even if it’s virtually the same on the face of it, I’m extremely pleased with the new site, and I’ve put a lot of hard work into it. Please let me know if you find anything that’s broken, or if you have any feedback/suggestions for future development.