It wasn’t long after I got my blog working that I wanted to make changes that could break the whole thing. Time to set up a test/dev instance! Connecting Branch to (production) App The easiest way is to follow the prompt at the top, once the master branch is set up: Clicking Set up a test version of your site by connecting a feature branch, gives the option to choose the branch: …

I’ve been doing a lot of work setting up this blog lately. One thing I’m looking forward to is having the ability to point to a public project important enough to me to work on outside of employment. This blog has a pipeline in Gitlab that interfaces with AWS Amplify to auto-generate the site when code changes are pushed, and I’ve made some interesting design decisions on how I implemented new features of the site that I think do a good job showing how I put thought into my effort. …

When I thought about what I wanted in a server-less blogging solution, I knew that adding images to my blog entries was likely going to be a thing. I had anticipating needing to write my website that I’d use to manage images. That day might still come. But not today. This morning I found Forestry.io, which is effectively a CMS that can be used for static web site generators. I write it about it here. …

When I envisioned setting up a server-less blog, I had thought I was going to need to build the piece that handled WYSIWYG Markdown editing as an AWS Amplify app. As a temporary measure, I used StackEdit.io as a way of writing the Markdown, but had some issues with it. When I couldn’t get it to display content, and couldn’t figure out why, I moved on to use GitLab’s Web IDE. …

I wasn’t really sure how Amplify Console was going to work out for me, so I took a shortcut to testing out a proof of concept. When I started thinking about this, I had planned on building my own server-less components using Flask, Pelican, and a few clever lambdas. But I’ve also been meaning to start working with go – so I figured I could give Hugo a try: …

Most of the static blogs I’ve seen on the internet have their content saved in a git repo of some sort. In this blog post, I’m covering how I set up my blog repos. I put some thought into it because I want to be able to make blog changes from a compromised terminal without compromising my blog. (Not that I would ever knowingly do this, that’s just the standard of security that I want to aim for: I got the idea while exploring play-with-docker. …

I’ve been trying to start a blog for years now. I’ve had a lot of issues with sustainability. Each time I figure out a way to take another layer of maintenance out. This time around, I’ve kept old posts long enough to see some patterns. Since some of these blogs are difficult for me to read through today, I’ve summarized the stages below and moved most of the related entries into archives. …

This blog is written to share high-level ideas and implementations concerning dev-ops related topics. The blog is generated from its markdown source stored in GitLab by Hugo, powered by AWS Amplify – in other words, the blog and its content are completely server-less. I use forestry.io to actually write the content. There is a series on this site that details how I built the blog. blogging is hard for me At the time when I’m writing this post, the approach I’ve taken to build this blog is fairly novel. …

At this point, I’ve read many blogs that paint a very rosy picture of Ansible. My initial experience was not so rosy. In fact, it was pretty frustrating. In future blogs, I’ll provide examples. The purpose of this post is to record my initial impressions. I become fixated on learning Ansible when I realized that I was starting to repeat the same patterns while maintaining servers, and worse, the steps that I took to maintain them were not being documented, so I’d have to remember how it went each time. …

Quick status update. It seems like I’ve had absolutely no time lately. I’ve been focusing on a number of new technologies at work: top on the list has been learning Ansible and creating playbooks to configure ‘stock’ atomic-host servers for kubernetes. I’ve got plenty to say about Ansible, so I plan on starting a series of posts on it in the very near future. I have a few things to say about running Kubernetes “virtual metal”. …

Trying out AtomicHost for the first time.

In my last post, I pretty much slammed Wordpress and mentioned that I was using a Jekyll container to convert simple paragraphs ( Markdown files ) into web pages. Well, when I went to update my blog with my first post, I ran into a few issues that meant that the post never actually made it onto the blog. Since I’m here at these crossroads now, I’ll blog about the issue that prevented Jekyll from working. …

Goodbye Wordpress I lost my desire to blog with Wordpress the first time I watched it mangle my spacing, and then enforce whatever it was doing by not taking changes … until my efforts to make it accept my deisred whitespace wiped out the entire post. I remember feeling particularly angry that I had found a bug report mentioning this … that was … … years … old. Or maybe it was when I was messing around with themes, and I did something in the theme that caused the entire site not to load. …