August 2020

Started work on the first series backlog. Setup the website with a Cloudfront CDN, easy deployment, etc. Most time was spent on setup.

I work with AWS (among a bunch of other things) at work, so it wasn’t too hard to setup an account to run this website. That being said, I ran into a bunch of annoying things around getting S3 and Cloudfront happy. Eventually I ended up making the bucket a website and then pointing CloudFront at the website url. Goal of that is that CloudFront does the actual serving of files so I don’t spend money on S3 bucket fees. I did set a budget of $10, so hopefully I would be alerted if the website was costing real money.

Had some issues with forgetting to turn off draft status on my info pages. I ended up having to override 6 different html files from the theme. Most of which so I could turn a light theme into a dark theme. A bit of a tweak to the home page so I can show more than just one section on the home page. A tweak to the “info” section so that section doesn’t look like posts, but are just static pages. That’s where the about and series pages are located.

Would I do it again? Probably.

Now that everything is setup, the posts just kind of roll out when I’m ready. I don’t have to worry about keeping up some piece of blog software or getting hacked and trying to sell viagra (or whatever happens these days). I could integrate some comment system, but I’d rather setup a github account and ask for corrections to be posted to a series repo as Issues. I don’t want to deal with comment spam. All in all, this site should be easy to write new chapters, cheap to run, even if it gets popular.

Quick aside, I’m going to go on a rant about how shit some ts sites work. I didn’t add tracking, I’ll get any stats I need from the Cloudfront logs.

Looking forward to the potential triple header tomorrow from SpaceX.