Once again I'm giving this writing thing a go.
In the spirit of making it as simple and easy for me as possible I've decided to use a static site generator called Pelican which allows me to generate the entire site as a bunch of static pages.
Doesn't sound easy, but this is the way the web has been since the first web page was created at CERN. Oh yes, this is super geeky. The major advantages is that the content can all live just about anywhere that can host a static web site, and I can manage it all via a git repository somewhere. Secondly static pages are far more secure, I write the content, convert it to static HTML and put it up. No wondering if my content management system has been compromised by a bug or hacker and modified to serve up malicious software or ads and if something all goes bad I can just regenerate the entire site and host it wherever.
Along with the theme of simplicity also comes the hosting. A big reason to use the static pages is that it means I can also make use of the wonderful AWS S3 storage. Sure with the vast amount of views I'm expecting, in the neighbourhood of 2-5 views a day, it's hardly going to stress any host but it's a lovely contained system and does exactly what I want in a single place. Luckily AWS have wonderful tutorials about hosting static sites using S3, and I gain some nice performance toys like access to the AWS Cloudfront CDN as well as a free SSL cert, so really it's a pretty brilliant set up.
I've pulled in old stuff I've written in the past and it's tagged as archive and quite possibly will not make a lot of sense and may suffer from broken links.
Right at the moment the look and feel is in a state of flux as I put it together in a way that I like and there is currently no commenting. I've only really tested it using Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on the Mac along with Safari on iOS. It's quite possible it might look a little weird in other browsers as I've not had a chance to look at them yet. Static web pages don't lend themselves to dynamic changes like adding comments but there are several options available that use Javascript to allow commenting which I'm investigating as I go, if I end up with comments at all.
Feel free to email, or use twitter @ryanshort. Even after I decide on some sort of comment system it's still cool to use these as they're not going anywhere.