Blogtech

I went crazy trying to find and learn the easiest, yet most flexible technology for creating and serving a blog site. I started in the early days when everything was in hard coded HTML.  The along came CSS and Javascript and all sorts of products like wordpress.  After a lot of experimenting and playing I decided to take the lazy route.  I was familiar with JEKYLL and had built some sites with it, but I am not skilled in Ruby and did not want to learn new languages.  Also I didn't want to spend a lot of time on CSS even though I did want my site to work on any size device.  I kind of got hooked on Pelican which is written in Python, a language I do know.  But that wasn't where I wound up.

I found a great tool called publii which allows posts to be edited in WYSISYG or using Markdown or simple text blocks, so very easy to learn.  But it has the flexibility to add html and customize the css.  And it has some plugins and themes and one can also create their own.  I hope I will find the time to add a few features to my blog as time goes on.

Lastly I needed to host the blog.  Again, many options.  The easiest is to just use github pages which is free, but they would frown on me storing and serving so many images, so I switched to the old standby, Amazon.  Using Amazon S3 for storage was easy, I already is that for backups, but I also needed to understand cloudfront which allows https or secure serving it also caches the content, but I doubt my site will get enough traffic that it matters.  

Anyway, the blog currently is created with publii and served with amazon and publii is free, and my Amazon charges will be under a few dollars a month.