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| layout | title |
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| post | Getting Ready |
After contemplating about different options for hosting, blogging technologies and domain names for a couple of days, I have settled on the following configurations to start blogging! (for now! )
Domain Name
Bionic Beanie is a head wear from Portal 2 co-op. Portal series is one of my favourite PC games and Bionic Beanie Blog sounded great in my head (alliteration skills bruh!).
Bought it right away from Go Daddy. The package included DNS hosting as well.
Blog Tech
I wanted to use a static site generator as opposed to any CMS like Wordpress. They should be faster and easier to configure/manage. Jekyll is what I settled with - mainly because I recognise the name from my childhood.
To fasttrack my site design, I decided to use Lanyon which is an extension of Poole - which I also recognize from my childhood.
Hosting my blog
Bought the cheapest VPS from Vultr for $5 a month - 1GB RAM and a single core shared server. This is more than good enough for hosting my static files. I might end up using this instance for some of my other projects too.
Working 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, I just have to clone and build the files to publish new changes. I will push the blog site data to a remote git repository to manage the articles.
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.
Logo
The letters signify the first letter of the site's name. The color scheme is a reference to the two different portal colors in Portal.
Let's Go