Well, here it is. The first kick at the can at building and running a blog. Still working out the kinks, figuring out what I like “out of the box” and what has got to go. Why a blog you might ask? Who’s going to see it? Why even bother? At 5:00 am Saturday morning, coffee in hand, I asked myself much the same thing. The only answer I could come up with was, “why not?” I had an itch to try something new, so here it is.
By 5:15 am, with my second cup of coffee in hand and a notepad++ document full of potential domain names, it was time to get things under way. I use Amazon Web Services at work, so the experience there felt like a safe choice to start with for hosting my own project. Luckily, the free tier is pretty flexible for hobbyists and weekend warriors like me.
WordPress immediately jumped to mind for a blog tool based on popularity. After a couple hours of going through the WordPress documentation and building my required components in AWS, I was able to get myself a VM up and running, an RDS instance and MySQL database operational, PHP configured, WordPress Installed and running and my domain name mappings sorted out. *Phew* Time to reward my efforts with some GUI work.
The rest of the weekend quickly vanished to fine tuning, cleanup of the myriad of sample and test files I had created, reading more documentation on various AWS resources and generally ignoring my wife and dog far more than I should have. With Sunday quickly coming to a close, it’s time to put away the laptop, make some lunches for Monday and get ready for the work week. Such is the way of a hobby/personal endeavor. All the more motivation for “Episode V – The Blog Strikes Back”.
In future posts, I hope to include more photos documenting my progress through things like this, and to go into more detail on some of the challenges I faced and how I overcame them. Maybe down the road, someone else at 5:00 am with their own coffee in hand, asking themselves “why not?” can benefit from what ends up here.
Drew Grubb - Runtime Development 