I have been meaning to reboot my blog for a while now.
I got caught by “tech debt” as I needed to migrate from Jekyll to Hugo. I also wanted to “spruce up the theme”, make it more web-optimised, and also had to sort out some content storage issues.
But I never found the time - and was using LinkedIn to create content instead as a short-cut.
There is something simple, clean, and genuine about running your own blog, and so it was time to make it happen.
I knew exactly what I wanted - static website, modern web compatibility, markdown article authoring, simple deployment, and scalable hosting.
So I took my existing blog content and config (Jekyll-based) and used AI via the indispensable Raycast and started work. Here is what we did together:
- Assessed the existing Jekyll site structure and content
- Created a new Hugo project and initially installed the PaperMod theme
- Migrated 16 blog posts from Jekyll to Hugo format
- Converted front matter and fixed date formats
- Did initial deploy to AWS S3 and CloudFront
- Switched from PaperMod to the Blowfish theme for better features and customisation
- Set up site configuration (dark mode, noir colour scheme, navigation menus)
- Added SEO descriptions and summaries to all posts
- Organised posts into categories (Business, Technology, Cloud Computing)
- Added relevant tags to each post
- Configured homepage to display recent posts with summaries
- Created a custom “PA” favicon using favicon.io
- Set up an archetype template for future posts
- Built and deployed the site to S3 with CloudFront cache invalidation
I drove the process - but the AI did the hard-yakka of reading all the documentation, recommending the right configurations, updating content etc.
I probably spent an hour all-up. In the past that would have taken a day!
So now I have a nice updated blog to post in again - and I have time to go swimming instead of fixing my tech-debt!