blog

The code in this repo is a minimal blog I use to host simonguest.com. It's a lightweight, statically generated site, built from the ground up. It's responsive for mobile devices and supports full keyboard navigation and ARIA-compliant markup.

This blog is not a "framework" per se, but if you want to clone it, the following information will help you run in your own environment:

Running

To run the blog locally, clone the repo, npm install the required devDependencies, and npm run server to build the content and run a server on http://localhost:8000.

Writing Content

All content (articles, presentations, projects, and the about page) is located in the /content directory.

Each article is a markdown file that includes YAML metadata containing title, created, updated (optional), and and synopsis fields.

Build Process

The blog uses pandoc to generate the build artifacts, which can be found in the /dist folder. You can manually generate these artifacts with npm run build.

Deploying

The blog uses Github Actions and AWS CDK to build and deploy to an AWS S3 endpoint hosted via a CloudFront distribution. If you want to reproduce this deployment in your own environment, you'll need to setup Github secret keys for AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_DEFAULT_REGION corresponding with an IAM account that has permissions to create/delete CloudFormation stacks, assuming IAM roles, create and upload to S3 buckets, and create CloudFront distributions.

In addition, you'll need to supply CERTIFICATE_ID and CERTIFICATE_ARN which point to the ID and ARN of an existing ACM-based certificate for your domain.

Finally, you'll want to edit cdk-deploy.js to specify the S3 buckets and CloudFront domains corresponding with your site. This script synthesizes a CloudFormation stack which creates the required S3 bucket, uploads the content (from /dist), and sets up the CloudFront distribution.

Post-Deployment

After deployment, you'll need to create an A record for your domain pointing to the generated CloudFront distribution.