Completed move to static page hosting
So I was running my blog on a micro EC2 instance for the last year, of course I had not added much content (a mode I now boldly proclaim will change for the better) and my AWS “free micro tier for 1 year” plan was set to run out at month’s end. So I had to weigh my options:
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Acceptance. Pay $14 a month to Amazon, continuing comparatively massive consumption of machine resources, serving a Drupal instance whose sole purpose is to serve a few pages of my random thoughts to… eh… no one but myself.
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Punt. This is likely what Don Shula would do. Just scrap it. No one is going to read my blog anyway (save myself, skeptical that actually counts).
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Rebel. Find an alternative which shocks the system, something free (or near enough to free). If this alternative should happen to in some round-about way cause me to actually learn something then great.
I went with #3 of course. Did not take long to find some great posts about static blog hosting leveraging services such as S3 or Git. Well, Jekyll it turns our leverages either/both so it made good sense. I did spend a day or so puttering around with Git from my Windows 7 workstation, only to find that mostly Git for Windows 7 is provided only for hazing purposes for the newly initiated to Git. Once I wised up and fired up a VHD running Ubuntu I was on my way… to a 2nd day of puttering. At least day 2 of puttering involved something vaguely resembling progress so I kept fighting the good fight. Eventually I found I could install Git/Ruby locally, stage Jekyll in a new Git repository and by leveraging Jekyll-S3 do a pretty seamless staging of my site from development to production environments. Some outstanding tasks remaining like actually adding blog posts (this one is the re-launch if you have not yet figured that out) and finding a way to have AWS Route 53 point roge.me to the S3 bucket hosting this content (so far best I can do is a CNAME record pointing ftl.roge.me to the S3 bucket. Anyway, it works and as noted earlier I am likely the only one who will ever read any of this.
Christopher Roge
Faster Than Light
christopher@roge.me
