Building this website

Having been involved in software development for most of my career I wanted to use a toolchain that that was lightweight and low cost to build my own website. After some research I chose Hugo as the static site generator, Amazon S3 as the hosting service and GitHub as the repository for site customisations and content.

I spent a couple of hours getting Hugo, Amazon S3 and GitHub setup using the comprehensive documentation and examples found on their respective websites. In addition, I found the following pages extremely useful:

• https://capgemini.github.io/development/Using-S3-and-Hugo-to-Create-Hosting-Static-Website/
• https://capgemini.github.io/development/Using-GitHub-Actions-and-Hugo-Deploy-to-Deploy-to-AWS/
• https://victoria.dev/blog/hosting-your-static-site-with-aws-s3-route-53-and-cloudfront/

The workflow is straightforward. I use my local PC to configure the website and create/edit content. Hugo is fast and it takes seconds to try out a new theme, preview a post or change a menu item. Once I’m happy, I push the changes to GitHub and a workflow action is automatically triggered to build the static website content and deploy to Amazon S3.