Long Overdue Update
As a cursory glance at this blog reveals, I have not been writing a whole lot lately. I think this has a couple of causes a) I have gotten a new laptop and while it may sound trivial, I did not have a good solution for some of the data that make up this blog (mostly images), that needed to be transferred from one computer to another and b) I have been wanting to move away from Amazon AWS to Google GCP, but I have not had the time to really dig in and learn what needed to be done before I could make a static site on GCP.
All that needed to be addressed somehow, so here is my solutions:
Non-text Content
Originally I wanted to store the images used mostly on a thirdparty service, where I could embed resized images from, but I could not find a solution that really fit my needs - and mostly what I wanted to spend on it. At the end I came the conclusion that perhaps using Git LFS could be the solution, and once I actually got around to setting it up (which was much, much simpler than I thought) it did indeed work just like what I wanted, albeit I still have to size the images correctly.
Once I that moved the non-text content off my old computer, I could fetch it to the new one and move onwards from there.
Switching Clouds
Over the last few years I have been noticing a trend of companies moving from AWS to GCP, and I myself have been looking at the services they provide for projects with greater needs than just a simple static site. And in a way, it seems that the grass might be greener on the other side of the fence - or at least different. So I decided to move my blog to GCP, as so far it is at least different, at first I thought the products was a simple one-to-one replacement, but it turns out it was simpler than that. On AWS I had a S3 bucket used by CloudFront which in turn was routed to via Route53, while on GCP you just need Storage and then to point to it via a CNAME record.
At first I just added the CNAME record to the Route53 config, in essence having my AWS setup point to GCP, but once I saw the site working on GCP, I moved forwards with adding Cloudflare in front of the Storage bucket and to act as DNS for my site as well - luckily Cloudflare was simple to setup and was done in an evening, with most of the work being about 30 minutes, and the rest waiting for my domain authority to noticing the change and request my permission to move the nameservers from A to B.
Onwards From Here
Lately I have been trying out Lektor to see what it has to offer, and I am certainly intrieged about some of its ideas, I am somewhat torn on just adopting it or taking some features and adapting them to fit here - evolving my own code further.
Posted Mar 04 2019 by Esben Sonne