Blog Relaunch - All the Cool Kids Are Going Static

Jared Watkins — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

It’s built on a framework called Octopress / Jekyll which is written in Ruby. I don’t know ruby but it’s similar to perl and this framework is very lightweight and fairly easy to understand.. which is nice. The ruby code lives on my laptop at home.. far away from the barbarian hordes. It generates the complete blog website as static html files that are then pushed out to remote web servers. The web servers don’t need to run any sort of dynamic code and so can be secured more easily and the pages load much more quickly.

This change alone would have been enough to justify the migration.. but since I’m now working for Amazon Web Services I decided to kick it up a notch. So now I’m hosting this blog using CloudFront and S3 storage. The workflow goes like this… When I write a new posting the entire site is regenerated and pushed to a test system I use to preview the results. Once I’m happy the files get pushed from my laptop to S3.. then CloudFront kicks in and distributes the site from there to a fleet of Amazon servers all over the world. No matter where you are… you are routed to the nearest server to you on the internet. That makes it fast and resilient and super cheap as it turns out since you pay only for what you use… and a personal blog isn’t ever going to use that much. I expect this setup will cost about 20% of what I’ve been paying for the private server and it’s 1000% better way of doing things. If I had something really interesting to post and got linked from a site like the drudgereport or slashdot.. my little blog could handle the crushing levels of traffic that would flatten any single web server. They also deal with issues of redundancy and keeping it online and availiable.

I’m using a few plugins for Octopress.. most of which are about a page or two of Ruby code with a little Liquid, Markdown, and HTML mixed in. I also wrote some perl to automatically build image thumbnails and watermark some of my full size images. The image gallery pages are semi-automated and that’s the last bit that needs more work. I plan to set those up with Fancybox to make the gallery pages a little easier to use. I plan to release the perl scripts along with the rest of the source for this blog on github when it’s a little further along.

Static-Site on The Infinite Unknown

Blog Relaunch - All the Cool Kids Are Going Static