README.md

Romaji2Kana Website

Table of Contents

• 1. Installations & Build
  • 1.1. Installation
  • 1.2. Development (Continuous) Build
  • 1.3. Production Build
• 2. Dependencies
• 3. Cloud Infrastructure
• 4. Deployment (CI/CD Pipeline)
• 5. SEO

1. Installations & Build

1.1. Installation

No actions needed - everything required for this project...

• has been installed into this repository already (Tailwind)
• or is included externally (Wanakana translation library, Alpine Js)

Tailwind CSS is installed via the standalone executable, which is the recommended way of doing it for projects that aren't using Node.js and npm.

1.2. Development (Continuous) Build

Start a watcher, i.e. a process that watches the files specified in the content array from the tailwind.config.js:

• Windows: .\tailwindcss.exe -i css/input.css -o css/output.css --watch
• Linux: ./tailwindcss -i css/input.css -o css/output.css --watch

How it works:

• When something changes (and you press "save"!) it automatically recompiles the CSS into the css/output.css stylesheet, which is included in the HTML pages.
• It looks at the Tailwind directives in css/input.css to determine which utility classes' existence to even consider and check for.

Having done this, just hit Go Live on the VSCode Live Server Extension by Ritwick Dey, and all changes you do will on save automatically show in the browser (the extension auto-refreshes the browser).

1.3. Production Build

Compile and minify the CSS for production:

• Windows: .\tailwindcss.exe -i css/input.css -o css/output.css --minify
• Linux: ./tailwindcss -i css/input.css -o css/output.css --minify

To publish those changes to the romaji2kana.com public website you do not need to to execute this yourself. The CI/CD pipeline will do the minification and take care of everything. Just stop and restart the Tailwind CSS watcher from 1.2. Development (Continuous) Build to ensure the output.css file which you commit is up to date. Sometimes Tailwind classes that have been but aren't used anymore are not taken out out timely.

2. Dependencies

• WanaKana: a JavaScript library for detecting and transliterating Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji in all directions
• Alpine Js: a lightweight JavaScript framework, used here to build (the modal open and close functionality) and the animations, which would've been hard without: Tailwind uses Alpine for this as well, if you inspect their code. Knowledge required can be acquired via this course and specifically this video.

3. Cloud Infrastructure

The following diagram shows the cloud infrastructure the site is running on.

1. Incoming requests to the domain romaji2kana.com first arrive at Route53, because it has the authoritative name servers responsible for my domain. Here will be the value of the "DNS A record" returned, which is d15f3h5j74nmwf.cloudfront.net.
2. This value is the endpoint of my CloudFront distribution (a content delivery network). It serves cached copies of my static website's files, which I have put in an S3 bucket.
3. This CloudFront distribution takes a SSL certificate created for "romaji2kana.com" in AWS Certificate Manager and applies it to the website's connections.
4. The origin from which CloudFront takes these website files is an S3 bucket named "romaji2kana.com", where I put all the static files that make up my website.

Explanation of the different regions:

• Route53 and CloudFront are global services
• the S3 bucket is located in Frankfurt (eu-central-1), because it's is the preferred and closest region for me
• the SSL certificate is located in North Virginia (us-east-1), because this is the only region allowed by the CloudFront service for certificates.

4. Deployment (CI/CD Pipeline)

A GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline synchronizes all .html files and the logo.svg file to the S3 bucket.

This pipeline will be triggered by every commit in the Git repository.

1. A GitHub runner will checkout the code in the repository.
2. It will deploy the files to the "romaji2kana.com" S3 bucket.
3. It will invalidate the CloudFront distribution's cache, so the changes are are effective immediately.

5. SEO

Search-engine optimization has been done via:

• good content: providing exactly what a visitor would want in a very fast and easily accessible way
• great UI & UX: will reflect over time in search engines' metrics like traffic and bounce rate
• meta tags (basic ones + Open Graph Tags)
• keywords (in the respective meta tag and in the text of the websites)
• semantic HTML (e.g. header, nav, main, article, footer, code)
• ARIA attributes for accessibility
• Sitemap (sitemap.txt) to help search engines discover all my URLs so they can crawl and index them
• insane performance
• some backlinks (currently one in each GitHub + StackOverflow)

Lighthouse report with perfect score: