New site, new tech and new content

January 01, 2020

It has been over 10 years since I updated my personal site, so I thought why not make 2020 the year to do it.

I wanted to take the opportunity to not only examine new technologies but also create some fresh content that might be useful to someone.

As part of this effort, I want to document from start to finish, what I did along the way. I will split this up into a 3 part series that covers everything from building the site to deploying it to production. Here's the sections:

  • Part 1 - Creating a static site using GatsbyJS
  • Part 2 - Setting up a headless version of Wordpress
  • Part 3 - Deploying a GatsbyJS site onto Netlify

Some of the tools I'll be using are:

  • GatsbyJS (and ReactJS)
  • Netlify
  • Wordpress
  • Gitlab

Site goals

As part of this revamp, I had a few site goals I wanted to achieve.

  1. Monthly budget of < $5 USD - $5 was the total budget I had set for hosting this site, including any services that would be required such as mail.
  2. Proper CI/CD pipeline - I wanted to have changes that I made to the site automatically deployed to whatever hosting provider I chose.
  3. Minimal required maintenance - I didn't want to maintain servers, security rules or any other infrastructure. The easiest path was the desired path.

Stay tuned, I'll be publishing the series throughout the next few weeks.