Building a blog from the ground up seems a bit daunting at first glance. However, there are so many gems of knowledge and experience to gain along the way, and there’s nothing better than seeing something that you poured your heart into successfully up and running!

Getting Started

To build this blog, we are using Hugo to generate the static site. Hugo is a wonderful tool because it allows HTML and Markdown formats, enables code blocks in posts, and comes with ready-made themes, or templates, that can majorly help out with formatting. For this blog, we are utilizing the theme “Origin”, which is lovely because it has a clean & simple look and is easy to modify.

Infrastructure

As someone who’s completely new to website infrastructure, it definitely took me a couple of internet searches about AWS services to wrap my mind around what was going on. For our site, we used GoDaddy for the domain name routing. The routing goes from Route 53, to Cloudfront, to our S3 bucket where the assets for the site are stored. Cloudfront helps to make the loading of the website quite efficient and adds some security. For this website specifically, I was able to draw some inspiration from the infrastructure from some of our other sites. Starting without any reference might be a whole nother story!

infra_diagram

Pipeline

The pipeline to build this site has stages to build, deploy infrastructure, and deploy app. One really handy part of using Hugo is that you can label posts as drafts, so we included a flag as well to build or not build draft posts, for testing purposes.

Design

In my experience working with this blog, the design stage was my favorite because of the freedom it allowed. Because Hugo allows both HTML and Markdown, we chose to write posts in Markdown, which is completely new to me and did include some new learning curves when it came to adding images and sizing text. It’s a really great streamlined way to write the posts, though, so that they all have the same look. In terms of the look of the rest of the site, the Hugo template made it easy and fun to play around with colors, fonts, and logos. I really enjoyed having the freedom to play around and have fun with the look.

All In All

Seeing this site go from absolutely nothing to a real blog was an awesome experience. Dealing with all the little issues and roadblocks that might come up along the way might be frustrating in the moment, but really helps you to love the final product. I am quite grateful that I was able to help out with this blog, and can’t wait to see where it goes in the future!