The site you are looking at now is what this article is about.

I like the idea of having a very low cost website running only on Amazon's S3.

Since it's only on S3, it could only be html files that contain static content, javascript and css.

To make those static files, I coded a system that runs locally and creates dynamic content. When the publishing system publishes the dynamic content to S3, it makes it static.

To accomplish that, I did the following.

On the user's local machine, a browser based publishing tool gets spun up inside of Docker and runs nodejs, express, Sequelize, MySql, javascript, css and html. The user does not have to know anything about those technologies.

Create a blog article:

All site administration is done via the browser. Writing blogs, uploading images, adding YouTube videos, deploying to staging and deploying to prod.

List all blogs to admin them (same list interface for videos and galleries):

Nodejs generates the html files and and the navigational links and makes use of the aws-sdk to deploy them to staging and prod. Nodejs is also used to backup the database and save it to S3.

Manage deployments and DB backups:

Order the blogs, videos or galleries:

The browser based text editor is powered by Tiny and quite frankly is amazing.

The images uploaded for the gallery or the blog are managed by a plugin called Multer, which is also amazing. Drag and drop images to upload them. Nodejs processes the uploads on the backend.

Create a gallery and upload images:

The browser interactivity/events are all done via native Javascript.

Manage tags:

When the user creates a site, the backend submits a cloudformation template that creates:

- a production S3 bucket as a website

- a storage bucket for database backups

- an SSL certificate that automatically gets applied to the domain name

- a Cloudfront distribution that caches the content and provides ssl connections

- a dns entry that is an alias to the cloudfront distribution

All of the user submitted content is evaluated for appropriateness (and legality) by AWS AI (recognition for images and comprehend for text) that a moderator (aka me) can browse via a dashboard.

As of right now, create your own site, while functional, is "coming soon" as the lowest cost per month is at least $30 and only goes up. I've integrated Amazon.com affiliate program into the sites, but I want to find a more profitable revenue stream before making it live.