Start a Blog

Since everyone is writing blog posts in the tech world, I thought I would give it a shot. This particular post is going to be about setting up your own blog, using the same tools and services I used.

Blogging Platform: Wordpress

I’ve dabbled with setting up Jekyll, a Ruby-based tool that lets you build a static website from Markdown files. Similarly, I tried Poet, which lets you set up a blog generator using Node.js. These tools have a bit of a learning curve and are geared more towards people that want to tinker a lot with their blog.

Since I just wanted something quick, I swallowed my pride and decided to go with Wordpress. Despite PHP’s shortcomings, Wordpress is a solid blogging platform.

Hosting Platform: AppFog

A few years back the obvious solution was to pay 5 USD a month and host your blog on a shared hosting environment. Maybe even a Virtual Private Server (VPS) if you needed the extra horsepower, for lack of a better word. Back in 2012 I wrote a Developer Works article about how Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings are taking over.

Heroku vs EC2

I’ve used Heroku and Amazon EC2 in the past, but this time I decided to steer away from those. Using Heroku’s free tier means dynos (which are more or less their request handlers) shut down after ~30 minutes. That means it takes 20-30 seconds to access the application for the first time. I didn’t go with Amazon because their free trial only lasts a year, and after that it’s ~15 USD/month for their lowest tier instance.

AppFog’s Free Tier

AppFog’s free tier provides the following:

8 instances
100MB of DB storage
5GB of bandwidth
100 requests/sec
2GB of RAM

Which is more than enough for a small blog like mine. Unfortunately they removed linking domains (e.g. cnandreu.com instead of cnandreu.aws.af.cm) from their free offering, as you can tell from my tweet a few days ago.

They claim this was done because of abuse, but as someone suggested on Google Groups, people could’ve provided a credit card for verification before being allowed to link an external URI. It seems like a ploy to get people to start paying, but it’s a steep sell from $0 to 20 USD/month.

Installing Wordpress on AppFog

Installing Wordpress is basically a single click install — see their Jumpstart docs. All you need to do is create an account, create a new application, select Wordpress, select the infrastructure (i.e. AWS US East), pick a sub-domain name, and visit the URL. Done!

Performance Tweaks for Wordpress on AppFog

There’s a good blog post titled “How to make WordPress absolutely blaze on AppFog”. It basically recommends running 5 instances of your blog at 384 MB of RAM a piece if you want to get the best performance possible on the free tier.

Blog Theme: Svbtle

Someone took the time to port the theme from svbtle.com to Wordpress. You can get it from the following GitHub repository: themeskult/wp-svbtle. It’s worth mentioning that you get responsive design for free when you install the theme — try resizing your browser window.

If you’re using AppFog, you need to install their command line tool, af. Then log in, pull the source code, add the files from the theme, and update the app. These are the commands I used:

af login [email]
# Enter password
af pull [app-name]   # Downloads last pushed source
# Move the files from the template
af update [app-name] # Update the application bits

Comments: Disqus

I absolutely loathe when websites require you to make yet another account you’re never going to remember for silly things like leaving comments. I didn’t want to give my readers that experience, so I opted to use Disqus over the comment system provided by Wordpress. They provide Comments as a Service and support logging in with Facebook, Google, etc. It was quite painless to set up — just install the following plugin: Disqus Comment System. You can do it from your blog’s admin panel: Plugins > Add New.

CSS Fix

I had to fix the CSS a bit: Appearance > Editor > Stylesheet (style.css). Just add the following to the bottom of that file:

#disqus_thread {
    margin-left: 8%;
    width: 75%;
}

Using IDs for CSS selectors is discouraged, but I didn’t feel like spending too much time on this.

Analytics: Google Analytics

I haven’t tried any analytics alternatives, but Google Analytics has always worked well for me. Just create an account, provide the URL for your website, and get an ID (e.g. UA-XXXXXXXX-X). After a few days of collecting analytics you’ll be able to tell how many people have visited your site, how long they spent on it, where they came from, and other information about them (e.g. browser, operating system).

Wordpress Plugin

I used the Google Analytics Wordpress plugin. Go to your blog’s admin panel: Plugins > Add New. Then add your ID under Settings > Google Analytics.

iOS Application

I installed Analytiks. It was free and it looks very nice — what more could you ask for?

Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language. I’ve been using it for everything from quick notes to proper documentation. If you’ve ever posted on StackOverflow or Reddit, or created a README.md file on Github or Bitbucket, you’ve already used Markdown.

There are popular editors for every operating system; here are my recommendations:

Mac: Mou
Windows: MarkdownPad
Linux: ReText
Web: Dillinger

Protip if you’re using Mou: go into Options > General > Check Spelling While Typing. You can also change the theme if you don’t like the default one while you’re there. There are some themes on Github.

If you want to use Markdown in your pages and posts, just install the following Wordpress plugin: Markdown on Save Improved. Go to your blog’s admin panel: Plugins > Add New.

Mobile Blogging: Wordpress iOS App

Wordpress has a free iOS application for blogging on the go. You can use it with self-hosted blogs too — just provide the URL and the administrator account’s credentials.

I haven’t looked into this — any recommendations? I’ll probably post about it at some point. I may try Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates.

Or send a tweet to @cnandreu if the post was helpful.