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I recently bit the bullet and created a personal site for myself so that I could do the "tell people about it" half of this advice. I'm so glad that I did. I'm

I recently bit the bullet and created a personal site for myself so that I could do the "tell people about it" half of this advice. I'm so glad that I did. I'm pretty happy with the technical aspects of what I ended up with, in terms of simplicity, how easy it is to add content, and how little I have to do admin on the server. I use S3 static website hosting and a dead-simple node.js script to generate the page, and then use s3cmd, a wonderful little tool that is in my distro's package manager. So the cool thing is that I pay approximately 3 cents per month for the hosting, I can take any amount of traffic no problem, and server crashes are out of the question. On top of that I can preview perfectly what I will see before I publish by viewing what I am about to push with the file:/// protocol. Result: http://andrewkelley.me/ http://andrewkelley.me/ It's open source: https://github.com/superjoe30/andrewkelley.me https://github.com/superjoe30/andrewkelley.me

aktau 13y ago
Exactly the same thing for me! I was thinking: "man, I should write something about this" for a long time and never committed to it because I had the lame excuse that I did not have a personal site. So last week I finally caved, I learned nanoc, a static site generator in Ruby, and got to work. I didn't know Ruby either but to be honest it wasn't such a big deal, I learned what I had to pretty quickly and you can find some great examples online. I especially liked the little bits, like the fact that it's so easy to let nanoc generate a sitemap for me, which I could submit to Google and Bing to cozy up to the search engines. I'm currently still using more or less the default template because I find it to be pretty readable, but I'll change that soon, content is more important first. I didn't feel like paying for hosting, so I picked github as my host, which is working wonderfully. To use it with a custom domain you own, all you have to do is add a CNAME file to your repository. This is the site: http://www.aktau.be/ http://www.aktau.be/ (currently only 1 real article + the about/contact page up but more drafts are in the pipeline) Mine's open-source as well (of course): https://github.com/Aktau/aktau.github.com https://github.com/Aktau/aktau.github.com I got a cheap domain name for my own country from versio.nl, but they didn't seem to offer free DNS, so I'm using a free account at http://www.luadns.com/ http://www.luadns.com/. Which is, quite frankly, the most fun I've ever had configuring DNS. Write it in Lua, git push and you're done. So, the only thing I'm paying for is my domain name, which costs me about $2 per year. Awesome.
ubojan 13y ago
I have lots of websites hosted on S3 - you can have up to 100 buckets per account and every bucket can be a website. I use different setup - s3sync for syncing and AutoIt script for static blog generation (~100 lines of code).
thoughtpalette 13y ago
Just wanted to say you've some awesome projects on github!
- AndyKelley 13y ago
  hey thanks :)

aktau 13y ago

Exactly the same thing for me! I was thinking: "man, I should write something about this" for a long time and never committed to it because I had the lame excuse that I did not have a personal site. So last week I finally caved, I learned nanoc, a static site generator in Ruby, and got to work. I didn't know Ruby either but to be honest it wasn't such a big deal, I learned what I had to pretty quickly and you can find some great examples online. I especially liked the little bits, like the fact that it's so easy to let nanoc generate a sitemap for me, which I could submit to Google and Bing to cozy up to the search engines. I'm currently still using more or less the default template because I find it to be pretty readable, but I'll change that soon, content is more important first. I didn't feel like paying for hosting, so I picked github as my host, which is working wonderfully. To use it with a custom domain you own, all you have to do is add a CNAME file to your repository. This is the site: http://www.aktau.be/ http://www.aktau.be/ (currently only 1 real article + the about/contact page up but more drafts are in the pipeline) Mine's open-source as well (of course): https://github.com/Aktau/aktau.github.com https://github.com/Aktau/aktau.github.com I got a cheap domain name for my own country from versio.nl, but they didn't seem to offer free DNS, so I'm using a free account at http://www.luadns.com/ http://www.luadns.com/. Which is, quite frankly, the most fun I've ever had configuring DNS. Write it in Lua, git push and you're done. So, the only thing I'm paying for is my domain name, which costs me about $2 per year. Awesome.

ubojan 13y ago

I have lots of websites hosted on S3 - you can have up to 100 buckets per account and every bucket can be a website. I use different setup - s3sync for syncing and AutoIt script for static blog generation (~100 lines of code).

thoughtpalette 13y ago

Just wanted to say you've some awesome projects on github!

AndyKelley 13y ago
hey thanks :)