Moving to Jekyll and Amazon S3
I have been using a hosted Wordpress blog for this site. The annual subscription was due for renewal this October, I thought this might be the right time to get my hands dirty with getting this site on Amazon S3.
The reason for change
Amazon S3 enabled website, S3 is great, cheap (using RRS), can take care of any kind of traffic (never had much anyways) ... feels great to be running a site without worrying about configuring a web server or database!
Wordpress is great, setting up is a breeze, search for a theme, get few plugins, write few posts, great UI ... it's just too straight forward. The whole process of publishing a post needs to be little more fun, there has to be some more geekiness to it and that's where Jekyll fits in very well
Static Site Generator / Tools etc
Started looking at static site generators, thanks to this post - Jekyll was the clear choice. It is being developed actively, bunch of plugins, lots of help available.
Got Ruby, banged my head couple of times on every wall in the room figuring out the dependencies, versions etc. Got rvm, banged my head on the floor - Snow Leopard is 64 bit ... until I read this post ... phew! I am not getting Lion atleast for now
Finally got Jekyll, migrated my Wordpress XML dump, added Markdown, Pygment, Disqus etc
Next picked up Less Framework, clever use of CSS3 media to take care of different screen sizes. Tweaked the default CSS, played with Kuler ... UI / CSS is not something I am good at - tried to rip off things from here and there and got this site up Wrote a shell script to automate the compression, setup of expiry tags etc when syncing with S3 buckets using s3cmd
CNAME / DNS settings
What I thought would be an overnight process took over 5 days. Updated name servers to net4.in, where I picked up my domain name from. Submitted the CNAME request and it took forever to see the changes reflect. Tired of calling them up and logging tickets - each time the response was some server got stuck or some crap ... Their console to update DNS just does not work.
My weekend project, spilled over into the next week - resulted in the site being down for few days - going forward I will take care of DNS etc upfront
Over the next few weeks, will setup archives, RSS feeds, better integration with twitter and g+