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| layout | title |
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| post | Getting Ready |
After contemplating about different options for DNS, hosting, and the bloggging technology for more than a week, I have settled on the following configurations to start blogging! (for now! )
DNS
Bionic Beanie is a head wear from Portal 2 co-op. Portal series is one of my favourite PC games and Bionic Beanic Blog scores 10/10 on alliteration consonance (in my opinion :P)
Bought it right away from Go Daddy. The package included DNS hosting as well.
Blog
I wanted to use a static site generator as opposed to any CMS. In my experience, CMSes typically get bloated with more plugins and addons and tend to get slower. Jekyll is what I settled with - mainly because I recognise the name Jekyll from my childhood with The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Also, Jekyll is highly configurable and blazing fast!!
To start things off, this site is powered by Lanyon which is an extension of Poole - the Jekyll butler (name derived from the afore mentioned book).
Hosting
Bought the cheapest VPS from Vultr for $5 a month - 1GB RAM and a single core shared server. This is good enough for hosting my static files.
The Setup
The server will run behind an nginx instance serving static files from _site folder that are built as part of jekyll build process. This way, to publish new changes, I just have to clone and build the files. The blog itself will be in a private git repository.
LetsEncrypt helped issuing free ssl cert for my domain.
The below nginx conf concludes the setup of the blog.
server {
location / {
root /var/www/html/site; # synlink to _site
}
listen 443 ssl;
ssl_certificate <path to chain.pem>;
ssl_certificate_key <path to private-key.pem>;
}
I can make new changes on the repo and push them in.
And publish new changes with JEKYLL_ENV="production" bundle exec jekyll build from inside the VPS.
It should be possible to do this with a git hook, but I'm not too worried about it right now.
Let's Go