For somebody who posts once or twice per year, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my time setting up this website:

  • I have no interest in running my own Wordpress instance or anything like that so I use Jekyll.
  • In the rare case when I write a new post (like today!), it gets checked into a Github repository.
  • The Github repo contains an action that uploads the website content to an S3 bucket upon every commit.
  • The domain is registered in Route53 and configured to serve static content from said S3 bucket. No webserver required.
  • In close partnership with my dear friend and always reliable intern Claude Code, I created my own Jekyll theme that I can modify however/whenever I want.
  • I use the lovely Jekyll Remote Theme plugin to avoid the hassle of creating gemfiles.

I also do most of my hacking on my iPad. I use the free Terminus app to ssh into an EC2 instance where I can pull/push to/from Github, and the free version of the app supports port forwarding so I can test changes on the iPadOS Safari. It works fine for the vast majority of changes–the only time I need to use a “real” computer are those unusual occasions when I need access to the browser console.