Raison D’Etre

I used to use GitHub pages to host a very minimal (only HTML and CSS) personal webpage. But I’ve always struggled to keep track of interesting links and/or music, so have consistently been on the lookout for a suitable application / methodology to keep track of such things.

Turns out an application/methodology already exists — blogging and/or posts on personal websites.

Whilst the majority of this site is predominately geared towards acting as a “central hub” for career type of things etc., the page://posts section is basically anything and anything I want to keep a note of.

And it means I can do that without the mental load of “wait, did I store this on my workstation machine in Linux? Or the Windows partition? Did I use the bookmark script I wrote 2 years ago? Or did I write it to the yacy directory full of text files? Is it one of the tabs in Firefox on my Android phone or in Safari on my iPod?”

Below is basically my reference guide in case I ever forget how I set this up. This isn’t meant to be helpful for other people — it’s for when I completely forget how I put this together and can’t find the links below (once again).

Setting Up

I basically used the following guides to get this working pretty quickly and easily for circa £2.50 pcm (which is a lot cheaper than spending 20 hours pcm searching around for that thing I once saw somewhere on some device at some point).

• AWS: Launch a WordPress website
• AWS: Enable HTTPS on your WordPress website

A few notes below for differences with my set up from the Launch guide above:

• Because I already have an AWS Route 53 hosted domain for dijksterhuis.co.uk the name servers step [6.c] can be ignored in the “Launch” guide (they’re already set up for AWS services)
  
• Instead of pointing at the apex domain in step [6.d] I use an A record for wordpress.dijksterhuis.co.uk pointed to the static instance IP (this is done in the Lighstail UI)
  
• Back in normal AWS Route 53 I set up another A record for @.dijksterhuis.co.uk pointing at the same static IP address.
• Then I can set up CNAME records in AWS Route 53 for both www.dijksterhuis.co.uk and whoami.dijksterhuis.co.uk (the old GitHub pages subdomain) pointing at wordpress.dijksterhuis.co.uk

Now I can manage sub domains within Route 53, meaning I can keep my sub-domains that point at servers outside of AWS without having to migrate everything over to Lightsail.

For the certificates guide, the changes are to run bncert-tool with:

sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool --domains dijksterhuis.co.uk,www.dijksterhuis.co.uk,wordpress.dijksterhuis.co.uk,whoami.dijksterhuis.co.uk

Then choose No when it asks about non-www to www redirections.

Then it’s a simple case of run the wordpress import wizard, set up the plugins correctly, make changes to the site template and then bob’s your auntie.