New blog style. Like it?
Well, more than a new blog style. A new blog engine, and a totally different way for me to add content. Hopefully a way that will suit me better and ultimately lead to me writing more posts!
So before I tell you why I’ve changed it, I’ll tell you what I’ve done. Previously the site was a Wordpress blog running on Windows in Amazon AWS. It was a micro instance I’d started with my free first year and installed Wordpress onto it. I chose it at the time because it was easy to set up and use, and gave me a bit of exposure to AWS. I’d also tested Wordpress out on my Synology NAS beforehand so was happy with the blog engine. In hindsight setting up an EC2 box isn’t really going to teach much about AWS but that’s something to discuss in a future post.
My free year ran out and it started to cost me £15 a month to run. Not ideal but not overly expensive, I was more annoyed that for the money I wasn’t really learning much. The backup procedure wasn’t really slick though, and I wasn’t keen on the database under the hood. I really wanted something with a bit more source control over the content.
So now it runs on Jekyll, hosted on Github Pages. Really easy to set up. I write my blog posts in a Ubuntu VM because I found Jekyll wasn’t always happy running on Windows, but I’m fine with that. I like the simple text format of the blog posts (everything is written in markdown) and the control I have over layout and presentation. The inbuilt source control from Github. The fact it costs me nothing to run yet it’s quick. Loads of different things.
Oh, and I get to learn something new too.