It is 2019 and the future is NOW. As a human race we are are still struggling with global warming, alternative “facts” and few other tidbits. But what we have really, really nailed down is sharing content online. So how hard can it be to build a blog?

Well thanks for asking! Extremely easy. There are solutions left and right. One might say, you should not even do it. Use instagram.com, they have a nice website. Host your eggs there…

Well, I fully intend to. But first I will procrastinate! Content creation is hard. You have to sit, think and get the spelling right. It is much more interesting to build this first:

hence the procrastination

Few high level goals for an overengineer blog:

Infrastructure

• HTTPS - yes folks everything you read here has been encrypted because 🔒 is a badge of honour
• HTTP/2 - Haute couture on the internets nowadays
• CDN - Pages need to load fast, very fast. There is no excuse for slow, life is too short
• Static - thinks should be static unless they need to ne dynamic, not vice versa
• Cached - static means cacheable, cacheable means fast, fast means happy
• Cheap - if it brings no money it should cost (almost) no money
• AWS - it has it’s own kinks, but it is made with best intentions in mind and honestly it is AWeSome!

DevOpv

• For a blog? Are you mad? Probably
• Commit - it would be nice if you could just do ``git push` and the thing updated itself magically
• Build - you can keep build artefact in source control, but then you will never go to heaven
• Test - yes, thank you for testing ❤️

Dev

• Jekyll - something to take posts, few page templates and build a website
• SASS - Did you know that is stands for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets and I absolutely did not need it?
• Markdown - Because you can only close that many xml tags in your life

Why not github pages? Actually, ivankathetanka lived on github for few weeks. But honestly it was like having your personal blog on wikipedia. It is not meant for that. Use it for your open source project documentation. There is nothing better for that! I’ve quickly gave up trying to squeeze into the limitations imposes by jekyll on github and decided to host on AWS instead.

I suppose the end result could be summarised by XKCD 974:

Repository structure

ivankathetanka
├── _includes - JS shared across pages
│   └── shared.js 
├── _layouts 
│   └── compress.html - layout that compresses HTML
├── _posts - every post goes here
│   └── 2019-05-01-we-are-here!!!.markdown 
├── _sass - shared styles
│   └── shared.scss
├── _site - the output folde created during build
│   └── *.html and resources
├── css - top level styles
│   └── styles.scss
├── js - top level sripts
│   └── card-modern-blog.js
├── img - processed images
│   └── *.png/*.jpg/*.svg
├── raw_img - unprocessed images
│   └── *.png/*.jpg/*.svg
├── favicon.ico - oh this is a beauty!
├── index.html - main site template
├── map.html - page with a map
├── route.json - geojson for the map
├── buildspec.yml - CodeBuild build file
├── Gemfile - Ruby bundle dependencies
├── Gemfile.lock - Ruby dependency versions
├── _config.yml - Jekyll configuration
├── optimise.sh - script for compressing the images 
└── serve.sh - script to start local dev server

Coming soon:

• Juicy details on code pipeline
• Lambda to update s3 object headers
• Image compression
• The geo location
• Route 53 entries
• The minimum number of Cloudfront distributions one needs to be happy
• Auto-generated background
• Javascriptless splash
• The actual trip to Mongolia