Thoughts on the website

Published on October 29, 2019

Hugo works! The Deploy is a really nice touch. Fixes loads of stuff that I have no clue about, at least to a reasonable first approximation (see e.g. SEO, GDPR, etc).

Git the generated source

A small philosophical question around whether it makes sense to check in the public directory to my git repo. That would basically provide an archive of what was deployed at each stage. At this point I’m tempted to do this, since it ‘costs’ very little effort and I can’t see any real downsides.

Hard computer science (cache invalidation)

CloudFront makes it pretty clear that Cache Invalidation is a more expensive option, and just versioning the S3 objects is a better option. So for the time being I’ve switched on versioning for the Bucket. I think that means that I can comment out the CloudFront bit of the Hugo deploy option in the config.yaml, but I need to double check. On quick reading of the CloudFront docs, it’s also possible that I completely misunderstood what is going on here…

This is a nice intro to the section title…

Costs

I wrote a short post on how to keep an eye on your hosting costs. I have a strong suspicion that there are cheaper ways to host (but they’re not always a realistic option working within a company). In any case, this was really a learning exercise for me.

I didn’t do the cost breakdown, but it would still be interesting to get an idea of the costs since they can be kind of hard to estimate. Maybe I’ll write a short post on that in a year or so when the costs are more clear.

To markdown, or not to markdown

Should I be using cross-references? This seems to be annoying compared to using markdown relative links, since that leaves my markdown more compatible. What do I lose by doing this?

Back to the Future

I noticed one more stupid thing, that I needed to use hugo --buildFuture to ensure that all pages were built. That’s because my docker container was running in UTC, meaning that I couldn’t understand why certain pages I’d just written weren’t being built (but could be seen when testing with the hugo server option).

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