So after thinking long and hard, I finally decided to give blogging a go. I am by no means a talented person when it comes to the written word. However, having read some interesting blogs about starting your own blog, I thought it might be a good way to improve my writing skills. Well they certainly couldn’t get any worse…

The Framework

So now that I had decided to start blogging I needed a portal to channel my written word through. Seeing as I work in tech, I knew I wanted something super simple to manage and easy to publish new content. I had a look at some of the common offerings out there, but nothing really stood out. And having worked with Wordpress in the past, I knew I didn’t want the overhead of dealing with all those plugins, again.

Then I remembered Hugo!

The world’s fastest framework for building websites

When Hugo was released a couple years back, I did have a little play with it and found it very easy to get started with and had a very simple site up and running within a matter of minutes. But as usual with me, I got sidetracked and moved onto other things, which at that time was starting a family. Spoiler, I will probably mention them a lot more in future posts.

Hosting

Hugo was the obvious choice for the framework, but now how was I going to host the static files of the website. I could do the usual thing and go to a hosting company and buy a hosting plan. Or another plan was to dig around in my loft and find a Raspberry Pi and run the site from my house. But as I work with AWS, the clear winner was to setup an S3 Bucket and host the files in there. Easy to setup and super cheap to run. Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Content Delivery

To help speed things up the site will be served from a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Now there are loads of these available to users, but none really compare to Cloudflare. Their free tier is really amazing and offers some really great features. They also give you SSL as part of your website, which is a nice touch.

Deployment (CI/CD)

Making the updating process as easy as possible, I took some points away from my day to day job and decided to use a CI/CD pipeline to build and deploy the Hugo static files to S3 for me. All I need to then concentrate on is writing the content.

End

So in conclusion, welcome to the new Byte Size blog and I hope that there is at least something for everyone. Feel free to reach out to me via my details on the Contact page. I will be following up this post very soon with a more in depth look at how the pipeline all works with building and deploying the files. Until then, bye for now.