Link to Production JupiterNebula Website
This repository holds the input and theme sources for the personal blog of Josh Taylor, jupiternebula.com.
The JupiterNebula website is statically generated using Wyam, an open source site generator. Wyam leverages ASP.NET Core along with a suite of modules to render static content with access to all of the power of .NET Core and NuGet. I have found it to be quite flexible, powerful, and familiar (since I write full stack C# applications for a living). I wanted something that allows me to take advantage of my experience with .NET while maintaining the economy and simplicity of static generation. Wyam fits the bill perfectly.
I am currently using the Blog recipe with a custom "theme" that I've been putting together over time. I put "theme" in quotes so I can clarify that I am using the word in terms of Wyam's Blog recipe and not in terms of CSS styling (to be discussed in the next section).
It might be cliche for an ASP.NET Core developer to choose Bootstrap, but it definitely makes things easier (especially for something I doubt too many people will even be looking at). I am using the Darkly Bootstrap theme from the great Bootswatch website. I have found Bootswatch to be an invaluable resource for quickly putting together attractive sites when you don't have the time or means to go all out on creating custom styling from scratch.
I am using Font Awesome for my social icons. I find their icons to be of excellent quality. It is very simple to find and add their icons to your site, a huge number (1,500) of them are free, and they provide a CDN link for their CSS. I have used the Material Design icons in the past, but I am much happier with the aesthetics and variety that Font Awesome provides.
I have made an effort to take advantage of the responsive CSS classes provided by Bootstrap to make the site as accessible as possible on a variety of screen sizes. Feel free to reach out to me if something breaks or looks ugly on your device.
All source files are hosted on GitHub. Pushes and pull requests to the master branch trigger a build pipeline on Azure DevOps which simply builds the site using the Wyam CLI tool, packages the site, and publishes it to Netlify using curl. Netlify is a fantastic hosting provider with free hosting available for personal sites. They offer CI/CD services; however, they do not currently provide .NET Core on their build agents.
Refer to azure-pipelines.yml for details on how I build, package, and deploy my site to Netlify using GitHub and Azure Pipelines.