Static Blogs Are Awesome

Static blogs hosted on cloud infrastructure are awesome when compared to older hosting solutions like Wordpress and Typepad. The benefits are:

• cheap
• fast delivery of content
• complete control to customize your blog
• you're not dependent on an external company

Over a decade ago, we gambled on Typepad as our blog host. However, the sands of time have seen Typepad sold off to some international holding company, and now it seems to be in stand-by legacy mode. We evaluated a few static blog replacements:

• Jekyll -- written in Ruby
• Hugo -- written in Go
• Pelican -- written in Python

We're a Python shop, so we went with Pelican. Now this blog you're reading is hosted on Google Cloud Storage and generated by Pelican. There are already lots of guides for setting up Pelican -- see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 . Here's a high-level outline of the steps:

• create a storage bucket in S3 or Google Cloud Storage, naming it after your domain name
• create a source code repository to hold your content
• upload your html files to your cloud storage
• edit your blog's DNS so that it points to your cloud storage
• test!

To be complete, here are the downsides of this static blog approach:

• Initial setup is longer
• No wysiwyg editor, you're editing Markdown or reST files yourself