Updates to site

Written: 11/03/2024

Up until now most of my projects and sites have been hosted on various services such as fly.io, GitHub Pages and DigitalOcean apps. To get more experience with AWS products and processes, I’ve spun up an EC2 and started shifting over some of my sites to it.

This included my Flask app and most recently this site. The ultimate goal for this process will be to setup a CI/CD pipeline to automatically deploy changes to the site, however that’s a future task at this point.

Visual updates

I wrote most of the CSS for the previous iteration of this site, however overtime felt that it could use some improvements. Around this time I also started to use a new vim theme, gruvbox and was trying to find colors closer to that. I came across Otávio’s page and considerably liked the look and feel of it so I worked to incorporate the color scheme to this website with some minor modifications mostly with syntax highlighting that I retained from the original site and such.

To compare the new look to the old one I’ve captured the homepages:

I’m planning to do some adjustments down the road but for the time being I’m good to go. A look at an example page comparrison:

Publishing changes

Up until now this particular site was hosted on a DigitalOcean app that had a CI/CD pipeline from GitHub. Anytime I pushed code to GitHub, Jekyll would render the pages and push the _site directory out to the app.

The primary change here is that I am using the Docker Makefile that I’ve referenced in the post Docker Makefile for Jekyll and this so far seems to be going well.

My current process is to run make build once I’m done editing the data. This builds the site within the _site directory and I can use rsync to get it up to the EC2:

rsync -avP -e 'ssh -p 22 -i ~/.ssh/file.pem' _site/ [email protected]:/var/www/html/

As a next step I will likely end up creating a script to do both until I get the pipeline going for the current implementation.