Fast, clean, lightweight blogging

Now, I’m not exactly a shining example of actual blogging - I get distracted by real life way too easily. However, on the technical side, I think I have a fairly good setup. Here is how you would duplicate it. I assume barebones linux knowledge and the ability to read carefully.

1. Get a server. You can get a free account from Amazon’s AWS and even a free instance for a year (a “micro” in their parlance, which is more than sufficient for a small blogging platform). You could also get a virtual machine from Fatboxes.com - I hear they’re pretty good. As it turns out, it doesn’t really matter which distribution you choose - CentOS, Debian, whatever. If you’re more comfortable with one than the other, have at.

2. Install the software we’ll be using to make things fast. Varnish and Lighttpd. For any reasonable distro, that should be as simple as a quick:

   apt-get install varnish lighttpd
   

   Varnish is a very simple beast. The entirety of the config you need is:

   backend default {
       .host = "127.0.0.1";
       .port = "8080";
   }
   

   Put that in /etc/varnish/default.vcl and start varnish. You might also check /etc/default/varnishncsa, set VARNISHNCSA_ENABLED to 1, and start the varnishlog service.

   Lighttpd is almost as simple. From the default config file, /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf, set server.port to 8080. Everything else should be correct out of the box. Once you change that, start the lighttpd service. At this point, you should be able to hit port 80 on your server with a web browser, and get a default page in response. Last step is to chown /var/www/ to your user:

   sudo chown user:group /var/www
   

3. Fork your own copy of octopress on github and then clone a copy on your local computer somewhere:

   git clone https://github.com/[your username here]/octopress.git
   bundle install # This installs all the gems and whatnot you need
   rake install  # This creates all the config files, directories, etc., you need
   

   You now need to modify _config.yml and Rakefile in the root of the new repo. They are well-documented with comments, and should be easy enough to figure out. Things you want to keep an eye out specifically are:

   # From Rakefile
   ssh_user       = "dbishop@hostname"
   document_root  = "/var/www"
   
   # From _config.yml
   url: http://gnuconsulting.com/
   title: geekery
   subtitle: of all stripes
   author: David Bishop
   simple_search: http://google.com/search
   description: General geekery, a dash of politics, and more.
   

4. Add your first post by running:

   rake new_post 'Hey, I'm blogging!'
   

   That will create a file along the lines of source/_posts/2013-01-13-hey-im-blogging.markdown. Edit that in your favorite text editor (vim, natch), using Markdown to format your text.

5. Once your precious prose is how you want it, it’s time to publish:

   rake gen_deploy
   

   And I’m sure that all went swimmingly with no errors. You’re welcome!