Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I also use Jekyll for my own blog [1]. However, because I really love naked domains (easier to dictate over the phone, shorter), I cannot do CNAMEs so I am hosting my blog on a free Heroku instance.

My initial Heroku config evolved too. I am now serving my pages through an Nginx server, installed with a custom buildpack [2] that I forked and modified a little to suit my directory structure (I could also make it compile the site on deploy but was too lazy for that).

I am also putting CloudFlare in front of it. Basically an article can end up on Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot and the traffic combined will probably not make it even blink, while the hosting costs are zero.

Whenever I see people bitch about Wordpress woes, setups of clusters, security issues, or about caching/editing/versioning/archiving plugins or about costly add-ons and restrictions, it makes me chuckle a little - but then again, this setup is not for mere mortals or optimal for large content websites - for technical people however is a freaking nirvana.

[1] http://bionicspirit.com

[2] https://github.com/alexandru/heroku-buildpack-nginx

With AppFog [1], you can get WordPress with the tantan-s3 plugin pre-installed for uploads so you can share nothing (but the database) and scale with a click. You also get Varnish caching with no additional work.

Full disclosure: I am an engineer at AppFog.

[1] https://appfog.com/

I'm sure your service is useful, however allowed-plugins and other restrictions is something I like to avoid, not to mention that 1-click scaling is 1-click too many.

Wordpress is only useful if you want to publish in multiple categories with articles created by other (non-technical) people, need designs made by other designers - basically for a publishing factory or for people that don't want the hassle of learning to use Git, Jekyll and a good text editor.

However Jekyll/Git/Heroku is simplicity in its purest form, especially for developers and with simplicity comes a lot of power ... like I've had 2 blogs before this one and I lost the content on both out of ignorance, by stopping payments to my hosting provider, then later regretted it.

My content right now is on my laptop, mirrored by both GitHub and Heroku and you get for free the history of all changes, while the articles themselves get edited in the most powerful text-editor ever created (Emacs). Scaling comes for free. Costs are zero. The domain is mine. I can publish however many ads I want (coughwordpress.comcought). It wouldn't lock me out if I were under 18 (coughblogger.comcough).

To me that's just awesome. On the other hand it's just a stupid blog. Which it should be. Which is why less is more.

Where is your fork of tantan-s3? If I recall it hasn't been updated by the author in over 4 years. I have a fork on GitHub here but it's not great:

https://github.com/cmwelsh/wordpress-s3

I host my current Octopress/Jekyll blog with Appfog and gave it a thorough thrashing with ab [apache bench] and blitz.io, performance has been great. It's easy enough to simply run an `af update` instead of `git push heroku`, in that sense.

There is a certificate error on that redirected naked domain for https://appfog.com

Thanks for pointing that out. We'll have it repaired right away.

Still broken, appfog.com still gives me a certificate for: redirector.zerigo.net

I looked at Jekyll for my recent blog rewrite[1] but I ended up writing my own[2] and hosting it on Heroku, for many of the same reason. Even without CloudFlare it's been able to handle HN homepage and subreddit hits with no perceptible performance issues.

[1]: http://bugsplat.info/2011-12-14-yet-another-not-very-static-... [2]: https://github.com/peterkeen/bugsplat.rb

Amen on the Nerd Nirvana! :)

Personally I prefer [1] using a subdomain over the bare domain. If your registrar doesn't support www redirection you could always use WWWizer [2].

[1] http://vvv.tobiassjosten.net/internet/using-www-for-your-dom... [2] http://wwwizer.com/

WWWizer is pretty cool, but I'd rather roll my own on Heroku. I have a Heroku "app" that Heroku thinks is PHP, but it just contains a .htaccess file with some RewriteRule directives to 301 http://example.com to http://www.example.com. I then do the real hosting elsewhere. :)

Heroku is great for precisely this reason. Dynos are basically customizable http legos.

That's awesome--I didn't know CloudFlare has a free layer. I'd thought about using S3 or Heroku for hosting static webpages, but I didn't feel like trusting a single Heroku dyno to a traffic surge and lost my interest in using S3 once I found out Google Cloud Storage now lets you host naked domains!

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