What better first main blog post than explaining how the site that hosts my blog was made. tldr: Source Code.

First i'll preface this with some caveats

• This framework has been made specifically to my workflow
• It's a major WIP and will evolve over time
• I didn't want to use a prebuilt framework like Gatsby as I wanted this site to feel more personal

Now that's out the way the tech stack, it's a simple tech stack for hosting - GitHub Pages with a custom domain routed via cloudflare. As for the what I call the builder, this script handles the generation of the site, it's written in Javascript and uses the EJS templating engine. The script will a set of basic steps

• Find all markdown files within a specified directory
• Parse these using showdown
• Calculate Reading time
• Generate full html pages using EJS and prebuilt templates
• Save html files to output directory
• Copy any other assets like images
• Generate the homepage, articles page, privacy policy
• Compile SASS
• Done!

There are some other missing steps like validation but that is the general inner workings. The deployment script is still very much a work in progress and has already caused many issues, but the idea behind it:

• Build the site
• Checkout to the blog branch
• Commit the docs
• Push
• GitHub actions does the rest

Some other honourable mentions are I'm using PM2, nodemon and http-server to make it easier to locally write and view the articles. If you're curious then the Source Code is open on my GitHub.