The website, previously at www.alison-mungall.co.uk, has been taken down. Highlights are in the screenshots section.
This project uses the Django web framework and has been deployed using a variety of AWS services. Below are some highlights.
At a high level, the website is a blog that allows select users (staff) to post text and images. Published posts can be commented on by authenticated visitors and staff. Some specific features include:
- Search/sort capability: The site allows the user to search and sort list views (drafts, posts and topics) using a search bar. For example, see class SearchView in views.py.
- Saving images in PK folder: The site saves images uploaded by staff in directories that includes the post PK (primary key). As the post PK is assigned by the database, this requires saving the post and then moving the image into a new directory. See class Post in models.py.
- Error report emails: The site will email the site admin if there are server or broken link errors.
- Social login: The site uses Python Social Auth for user login. LinkedIn was chosen as the social site due to this site being a professional blog, but more social sites may be added in the future.
- Rich text editor: The site uses Django CKEditor to give staff full text editing capabilities.
The AWS services primarily used are:
- Elastic Beanstalk: Used to automatically handle deployment, capacity provisioning, load balancing, automatic scaling, and health monitoring.
- Amazon S3: Used for storing user-uploaded images.
- Amazon RDS: Used for the site database. Database engine: PostgreSQL.
- Route 53: Used for the site DNS server.
To minimise the risk of losing personal data, and to comply with GDPR, the site stores the minimum amount of data to be functional. Regardless, the following measures have been taken to ensure the site is secure:
- Argon2: Used as the password hasher.
- Amazon EC2 Security Groups: Used as virtual firewalls to control traffic to each instance. Public access is restricted to the load balancer only.
- HTTPS: The load balancer redirects HTTP requests to HTTPS ensuring encrypted traffic only.
- VPC: All instances are in one VPC and the database is on a non-routable subnet and is not public.
Below are highlights of the website.
