I’ve decided to set up a new blog to record my experiences with writing Python.
I’m using pelican as the blogging engine, which is my first attempt at writing a blog using a static blogging system. The idea is that dynamic blog engines are wasteful by building pages up on the fly when they hardly ever change. Instead, I rebuild all the blog pages when I make a new post, which adds a bit of overhead to the posting process but makes viewing the blog faster. I’ve also put the blog behind CloudFront, which will cache the page close to you on the network and thus cut down on network latency.
So far I’ve been happy with the static blogging experience. The only obvious downside is that the blog doesn’t accept comments. I’ve run a WordPress blog for many years and got maybe 10 non-spam comments, so this obviously isn’t a big problem. I’m going to put comments on a Google+ page, to give somewhere to post comments if you wish to.
Update in March 2018: I ended up moving away from the static blog hosting in the end. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to set up an automated build pipeline on AWS, but it never worked as smoothly as I wanted. I’m back on WordPress now, although I am using CloudFront to hopefully make the site fast and scalable.