This blog is now hosted with Amazon Web Services

When I was 13, I bought a book called How to Program CGI With Perl 5.0 by Stephen Lines. Learning server-side scripting was like a whole new world. Back then, Javascript was not widely adopted, and with server-side scripting we could make websites do things we only dreamed of before. A few years later, my employer sent me to a seminar about building websites where the leader proudly informed us that anyone who had a website that wasn't dynamic didn't have what it took to succeed. I instantly agreed. Fast forward over two decades and I'm back where I started. The articles on this blog are now made up of completely static files. Exactly three connections to the web server are required to load a page, two of which get cached. Even the few images used for the layout are embedded in the minimalist CSS file. Page load times, while formerly quite fast are now even faster (an average page that formerly took me 1.25 seconds to load now takes as little as 5% of that). The only way for it to be less hackable would be to take it offline completely (although one could argue that my former very-well-secured WordPress blog was also, ostensibly, relatively difficult to hack). It's served by AWS S3 and CloudFront, so I don't have to worry about disk space, bandwidth allocation, security updates, and the like. If I hit the front page of Reddit again, my server won't go down, because this site isn't running on "a" server. It's running on probably hundreds or thousands of servers clustered in multiple Amazon datacentres. I wrote one script that builds the index files, but it runs on my desktop PC, not on a server. There's still very much a place for big and complicated content management systems, but a small blog like this doesn't need to render each page on-the-fly every time it's loaded. And, as I get older I learn to appreciate minimalism and simplicity more and more each day. As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you find this blog useful. Look out for some future posts from me about AWS. It's a great tool that you should consider for your own web-based projects whether hobbyist or commercial.