Moving to S3

I’m currently in the process of moving my blog to Amazon S3. I’m not the first to do this and I won’t be the last. My reasons for this are similar to everyone else. Wordpress is an excellent blogging and site platform. I have really enjoyed working with it and getting to know its innards. As I continuously evaluate the purpose of my site though, I have to keep the technology behind it in sync. A static site on S3 is that solution. It is more secure, fast, cheap, and easy to manage. It also provides me further learning opportunities as I lean into “serverless” technology.

Here’s a look at the previous site for reminiscing:

New Focus

My blog has focused on network performance up to this point. But, my recent shift in focus to AWS means my blog will naturally reflect that shift. I’m also passionate about other technologies and music. Being that this site is primarily for me, I will begin posting on those topics as well. I will still provide ways to subscribe to/follow specific categories.

Impacts to this site

The transition has just begun, so there are going to be many growing pains. Most of my static pages are being revamped and are currently unavailable. Some images are missing from my posts, and I haven’t double-checked the formatting of them. The list goes on and on. I’m including my To Do list below, so I (and you) can track my progress.

To Do

• Lock down S3 bucket
• Restore posts that failed to convert over
• Review previous posts
• Review static pages
• add travis-ci support
• check featured images
• fix category links in main headers
• fix displayed dates
• Convert to full/strict SSL on cloudflare with no mixed content
• Add Search
• Add post commenting
• Add Contact Form
• Fix URLs for friendly URLs
• fix taxonomies error when building
• create post outlining my migration experience
• update architecture post
• update/fix “About Me” static page

For more issues and future work, I’ve started using Github’s issues list for my repo here: https://github.com/csereno/chris.theserenos.com/issues

Thanks and stay tuned!