I wanted a place to capture my thoughts and reflections. It was mostly for me than anyone else. Clear writing equates to clarity of thought, so practicing writing outside work would help me. While I was at it, I also thought of building the solution myself because why not. This post is about how I did it and is meant to serve as a reference. Hopefully, I will also keep it updated as things evolve.

I decided to go the static site route and host it on S3, as that's what all the cool kids are doing. Having everything behind CloudFront will protect it against the apocalypse in case that happens. I can also use the domain that I own and play with AWS. I found A Beginner's Guide to Crafting a Blog with Metalsmith very useful. It is an old post, so I had to tweak some things. I decided to go with MetalSmith as it is active again and felt much more straightforward to use and easy to extend. To make it work, I had to take care of some breaking changes. For example, per metalsmith-layouts changelog, there are breaking changes with v.2.0.0, and I found an issue that helped mitigate it. For hosting the site on S3, I used this article. Initially, I planned to hand manage deployments since I can drag and drop generated HTML to s3 bucket easily but then having to invalidate CloudFront and other things led to me go with GitHub actions so I can commit and push and rest is automatically taken care of. When it worked, it made me happy and made the whole effort worth it. I referenced this post to automate deployment using Github actions.

That's it for now 🖖.