Personal homepage of Michael Strutt: https://mstrutt.co.uk
As is the done thing, I've built this site up from scratch to help showcase my skills, picking and choosing the right technologies for the job. For the backend I've decided to write a simple Node.js server using express. I'm using the lightweight and super-fast [Squirrelly](https://squirrelly.js.org/ to handle templating, along with marked and front-matter so that I can organise my blog in markdown files. On the frontend, I preprocess my CSS with Sass and then and use Parcel to handle all of the asset bundling. For continuous integration I'm using Codeship, which builds and deploys to a Digital Ocean VPS I manage.
Is this a little over-architected for what could (probably) be a static site? Yes. But I have plans to go beyond static and to leverage the architecture currently in place to go beyond the capabilities of a static site.
The server runs on Node. Check the .nvmrc file for the right version to use and install all dependencies
nvm use
npm install
To start the server in production or development, it's:
npm start
In development you'll also want the watch-and-build setup from parcel running at the same time
npm run develop
For a single build of all the content and assets (like part of a deployment) you can run
npm run build
For just picking up new blog content, there's a command to turn the markdown files into structured and tagged json
npm run build-blog
All commands and dependencies can be found in package.json.