Hello, world!
Background
Setting up a personal blog has been on my to-do list for quite a while, and an opportunity presented itself where I had some spare time which came up in between projects at work.
I had several requirements to consider before I even thought about what I would actually blog about:
- I needed it to functional and presentable, but also want to write as little HTML/CSS as possible. Frontend work just doesn’t do it for me.
- I don’t want to maintain any infrastructure. I do enough infrastructure management at work and for my home automation setup, so therefore it needs to be serverless.
- I want to be able to write posts on my local machine, version control it, and for it to automatically update the ‘live’ blog when I push to github.
Github pages
I looked at various hosting options, the most tempting of which was hosting it on an S3 bucket, the advantages of which would be scalability, ease of setup, and frankly, cool-ness. However, even though I wouldn’t be managing any infrastructure, I would still need to manage the bucket and the Terraform defining the bucket.
I was aware of Github pages, and settled on using that, because it is about as hands-off as it is possible to be. When combined with Jekyll, the level of automation you get really is impressive. The only Terraform I needed to write was to manage the route53 domain so that users can access the blog at this URL rather than the default Github pages one.
Theme
The default theme for Jekyll, ‘minima’, is actually pretty nice, but I wanted a bit more customisation, and after some research came across the ‘basically basic’ theme, which seemed to fit the ‘functional and presentable’ requirement, it was easy to set up, and had plenty of options for further customisation if I needed (unlikely if it means I have to write HTML/CSS…).