Blogging from The Amazon Web Services Free Usage Tier

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I thought for a while about whether I would make an “official” first post or just get right into the technical stuff that I find myself doing everyday.  I decided to do a little bit of both for my first post.  I’m going to have fun blogging, I hope to provide some useful ideas and information too.

I decided to start blogging for several very different reasons, among them:

  • I’ll be honing my writing skills for a technical audience, keeping my posts concise and focused on a particular subject, and providing useful information.
  • Selfishly, as a way to keep notes for future reference.
  • Compassionately, as a way to share my hard-won skills with those who may benefit.
  • As continued work on building a “professional brand.”
  • Human civilization is built upon the written word.  Why not?

How is it that I have WordPress running on AWS?

In short, using the yum package manager, I installed WordPress on top of a  LAMP stack riding on an Amazon Web Services EC2 Micro Instance using the official Amazon Linux AMI.  On this RHEL-similar distro, one needs to enable the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository to get WordPress and many other goodies.  I also enabled the necessary stuff for the WordPress Pretty PermaLinks, so the address bar might make some sense to a human and so that the search engines like me.  I am using the same instance for both development and production roles (yes, I know, but it’s free and I’m in charge).  I had WordPress initially configured for my development Apache Virtual Host and made some test posts during this time too, based on all the 404s I had with links and permalinks and switching it to the production host I would tend to recommend installing WordPress at your production URL directly and at least getting PermaLinks configured to your liking before you start writing.

WordPress plugin system:  After setting up vsftpd and opening ports for FTPS in the AWS “Security Groups” (aka firewall),  I brought two plugins up right away: the CloudFlare plugin so WordPress plays well with the great DNS and content distribution network that they provide, and the WordPress JetPack plugin because it looked cool.  Both seem to be working great, but I’ll keep you posted.

Since I want to gain maximum visibility for the blog, I decided to look into automating the posting to my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, and while there are several available, you don’t even need another plugin to do it.  First, I tied LinkedIn and Twitter together so my LinkedIn status updates get tweeted.  Then, I installed the LinkedIn WordPress application on my LinkedIn account and gave it the URL to my blog.  Boom.  Every time I make a blog entry, thanks to RSS, my people on LinkedIn and Twitter hear about it.  Do you hear me over there on LinkedIn and Twitter?  Good.  I’m social.

I’ve got another entry in the works going into more of my work so far with Amazon Web Services.  Also, I’m planning on getting deeper into HTML5 and CSS3 and trying to come up with a new look for my static scandora.com content.  This in addition to working on a MySQL-backed Java POS system, and playing with the Android SDK.