The making of this website
Part of the idea for making my own website was to use it as an opportunity to create my own tools for doing it, and also so I could write about it. I am now in a position where I can add a MD file to the posts folder, run the build script and have it generate the HTML for the pages. I think this is a good point to reflect on what I have done so far.
Before I get stuck in, I just wanted to mention the inescapable topic that is AI. As an engineer I have found it interesting to use tools such as Cursor and Warp. I have learned so much using them and I have found that the conversational approach to learning has really helped me clarify certain concepts that I was trying to grasp. It's probably something that deserves its own dedicated post, but I just wanted to mention that I have leaned on these tools, particularly for writing the scripts to build and serve the website locally. I have actually found that it encourages me to write more code rather than less. Where in the past I may have thought, I'll pick a library to acheive something, I'm thinking "I can give it a go myself!". I guess that's why I'm trying to build a SSG in the first place 😅.
To start with I'll describe my current workflow for adding a new post. The first step is to create a MD file in the posts directory.
The MD file includes a section at the top which contains some metadata about the file and it looks like this:
title: Hello world! | Paolo Di Pasquale
date: 1999-07-10T11:26Z
From there, it's just regular markdown. I wrote a build task and a watch task that can be executed with Deno and a bash script for both (build and watch) that run with the necessary permissions. That's one of the things I like about Deno. It has security built in and it doesn't let you read or write to the file system by default, you have to add the --allow-read --allow-write arguments to allow this.
To view the changes, I run both those scripts concurrently with:
scripts/serve & scripts/watch
[1] 82561
🚀 Serving ./docs at http://localhost:8080/
Listening on http://0.0.0.0:8080/
🔍 Watching for changes...
Then visit the URL above in my browser 🙌
Once I'm happy with the changes, I can merge into the main branch and this triggers a deployment to GitHub pages.
In a future post I might expand on the build task and how the files are generated in the docs folder (which is what GitHub serves), but I've had this branch open for a while now and I want to write about something else for a bit.