octopress

Minimize Amazon Cloudfront Costs With Octopress and S3

I learned an important tip that I thought I should share with others who are considering Octopress with publishing to S3/Cloudfront. If the S3 deployment line in your Rakefile includes the s3cmd option for “–cf-invalidate” you should be aware that this will drive up your costs quite a bit. (3 guesses how I know this) I had about a years worth of expected CF costs in my first month because I didn’t understand what that was doing.

Blog Relaunch - All the Cool Kids Are Going Static

I’ve run my own hosted server for many years now. Originally it was just to have my own mail server but later I decided to start the blog using Wordpress. It’s great to have the control and flexibility to do whatever you want with a server.. but there are definitely some downsides as well. Wordpress is great.. but there are constant security issues to worry about and people attacking your server trying to hack it with automated tools. Customizing it has also never exactly been easy.. and it’s a huge code base that I don’t really understand.

So this new version of the blog is far enough along that it was time to turn it lose.