Here we (Hu)go!

I’ve moved my blog. The old felixhaehnel.com blog was powered by a standalone Wordpress install running in Azure.

This was:

• expensive
• pointless
• slow
• constantly unsecure
• slow
• slow

So I decided to bite the bullet and look for a better CMS. What I discovered was: I don’t want another CMS. I want to manage and build my site locally. You know, like in the old days. Except not quite like in the old days; I don’t want to mess with HTML and CSS just to put up some new content. I don’t want to have to FTP into a server provided by my crappy ISP to update the page.

I want all the new buzzwords: Containers, Continuous Deployments, and static content.

Summing up my new deployment in one image:

So here’s the setup now:

• Hugo to build the site
• Hugo Cactus Theme to style the site
• Bitbucket to host the site
• Bitbucket Pipelines to deploy the site
• AWS S3 to host the site
• AWS CloudFront as a CDN

My new workflow looks like this:

• Run hugo server in the root of the repo directory
• Make some changes, mostly by writing Markdown files
• Commit and push (since it’s just me working on this everything is straight to master #yolo)
• (10s of elevator music)
• felixhaehnel.com is updated

This is, in my mind, how deploying a static site or blog should work. It’s simple enough I can add whatever content I want in seconds, but flexible enough so I can mess around with the guts of the page if I so choose.

The source to this page is available in a Bitbucket repository for anyone to peruse and/or copy.

This is my first adventure into this brave new static world. So far, so good.