StaticSite

Motivation

I started to build out this site because I wanted to play with AWS. This site is hosted via an S3 bucket's static web hosting capability and then fronted with the CDN CloudFront. CloudFront, unlike direct S3 hosting also gives you the ability to use HTTPS and not just HTTP. Nothing here is overly complex, but the Pelican framework is pretty slick and I've been experimenting with various customizations, themes, and plugins. It's been interesting to see the behavior of the caching and TTL (default of 24 hours) and how you update the site.

Note: With S3 hosting you can force the cache to request updated items by versioning the filename or invalidating the cache. Versioning the file name is much more cost effective.

Install the following Packages

pip install pelican pip install markdown

Configure AWS CLI

To sync this to S3, the environment will have to have AWS CLI installed and configured.
AWS CLI V2

AWS CLI Configuration Quickstart

Working with this Site

• Use the make html to publish and update the output folder
• Run a local python web server running at by first cd output and then python -m http.server which will be running at localhost:8000:
• Run make regenerate to constantly regen each time a chagne is detected
• Run the make command to see everything for this command
• Create new posts in the content/posts folder as .markdown files
• Useful tool to minify JS and CSS Minifer.org

Markdown

Here is a great basic Markdown cheatsheet Markdown cheatsheet

Additionally, for MultiMarkdown which is supported many places, see here: Multi-Markdown Cheatshet

Plugins

This site also uses a few Pelican Plugins. Follow the instructions here:
Pelican Plugins on GitHub

Clone the following repo at the top level:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins

Initial Starting Point

Generated originally based on the tutorial from:

How to Create Your First Static Site with Pelican and Jinja2

SEO Plugin

https://github.com/pelican-plugins/seo

python -m pip install pelican-seo

Adding Canonical Link to Template

Improve your Pelican based website SEO by adding canonical url

    ...
    {% if article %}
        <link rel="canonical" href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.url }}" />
    {% endif%}
</head>