Site Migration

After hosting this site on GoDaddy for many years, I've decided to migrate it to Amazon via S3.  Amazon has some great features for hosting static websites, although I've gone 'bare bones' to start.  I'm just hosting using an S3 bucket.  I'm using the wwwizer Naked Redirect service to redirect ericdaugherty.com to www.ericdaugherty.com, and then hosting the site out of a S3 bucket.

Amazon has a DNS server (Route 53) and CDN (CloudFront) that are easy and inexpensive to use, but I don't think I need them yet.  For now, I'm still using GoDaddy's DNS Server and the wwwizer 'hack' instead of Route 53.

The previous site utilized somewhat of a 'poor man's template engine'.  I had a html file for each page on the site, but had Apache evaluate them as PHP files and I used PHP Includes to build up the page using common components.

Moving to a fully static website meant I needed a real template engine.  I selected Jekyll and migrated the site over.  It was a pretty straight forward migration and ended up reducing the size of each file as I could use a true template instead of just having common components.

I then use the AWS console tool to upload the generated website files to S3 for an easy deployment, also allowing me to finally retire FileZilla from my tool chain.

Amazon has some pretty good guides to doing this, but I also used two good blog posts: Amazon S3 on Domain Root, without Route 53 and Static website on S3, CloudFront and Route 53, the right way!

The blog portion of the site is still hosted at Blogger, which has and continues to work well.  

This also forced me to make a few updates to the site, fixing some broken links and removing some no-longer-relevant sections.

Plus it gave me an excuse to finally post on the blog.