Cloud Confusing
Explaining hosting, AWS, Wordpress, static sites, and all manner of cloud solutions.
Need to Unpublish an Article? WordPress Post Expiration Plugin
WordPress is great at scheduling articles (posts) to go live, but what if you want to do the opposite — schedule a post to disappear? For that you need an expiration plugin.
Sal August 21st, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Content Management, Wordpress
How To Track Affiliate Link Clicks with Google Tag Manager
If you want to track clicks out of your site but you don’t own the page that is being linked to, it might not be immediately obvious how you can learn about your outgoing clicks. Some partners offer a conversion mechanism (a conversion pixel, callback, etc.) but many don’t. Plus not every click results in a conversion so keeping track of the people who are clicking out of your site can make a lot of sense. But how do you do it?
Don’t worry: tracking affiliate links clicks (or any other click on your site) is super easy and free.
Sal August 10th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Google Tag Manager, GTM
Cache Invalidation and Amazon S3
So you have an Amazon S3 hosted site with CloudFront caching in front of it? Nice work — it’s an affordable and highly scalable solution. One downside with this is that the cache, which helps makes your site so fast and cheap to run, is designed to hold on to files, possibly serving an old version to visitors.
That’s normally not a problem (it’s literally the point of a cache), but if you are making a lot of changes to the site and you want visitors to see them as soon as possible, then you will need to invalidate the cache and tell CloudFront to serve the most recent files.
Here is how you can do that…
Sal August 6th, 2018
Posted In: AWS
Tags: Amazon S3, Cache Invalidation, CloudFront, TTL
What is WordPress Gutenberg? And How Do I Get My Old Editor Back?
Have you heard the term “WordPress Gutenberg” thrown around lately and had little to no idea what it means? Don’t worry about it, there’s a fix for that.
Sal August 3rd, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Gutenberg, Text Editors, Wordpress
Beyond Nothing: A Minimalist Hugo Theme
If you have been exploring the world of content management and/or static websites then you have almost certainly heard of Hugo. If not, or if you could use a refresher, Hugo is a static site generator built in Go that can easily and efficiently be used to build out multi-page websites. It’s similar to Jekyll (Ruby), Next (React), and any number of other tools. I’ve found Hugo to be particularly fun to learn and easy to use.
Sal July 24th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Hugo, Static Site Generator, Static Website
What’s The Best Stack for a Side Project?
There was a great question over at Hacker News recently that caught my attention: What’s your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018? Or, in other words, what is your preferred stack for quickly spinning up a side project? Having given the subject a lot of thought in the past I found the responses (over 500) to be of great interest.
The thread is worth a read, but it’ll take some time to get through. In an effort to (collectively) save time I wanted to summary the takeaways. This is not an exhaustive list, just my takeaways based on a thorough read of the comments. And, yes, this is a obvious over-simplication and the below categories are somewhat arbitrary but I still think there is value in summarizing the entire (quite messy) set of responses.
Sal June 4th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Django, Firebase, Flask, Heroku, React, Ruby on Rails, Side Projects
How To Host a Free Static Website on GitHub
While I’m partial to hosting static sites on AWS with S3, there other ways to solve the problem of cheap/free static hosting. One popular option that works for simple one-page sites, single-page applications, Jekyll blogs, and more is GitHub Pages. All you need to get started is a free (or paid) GitHub account, a basic understanding of how git or GitHub works, and about 10 minutes.
Sal May 15th, 2018
Posted In: GitHub
Tags: Free Hosting, GitHub, HTTPS, SSL
Moving a Lightsail Instance to HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt / Certbot
So you have an awesome, affordable new VPS instance — maybe even a WordPress or Drupal installation — hosted on Amazon’s Lightsail. Setting up a Lightsail instance might be quick and easy, but moving it from HTTP to HTTPS isn’t as intuitive as you might expect. This is one of those instances where AWS stops holding your hand and expects you do to some real work of your own. But don’t worry, setting up HTTPS isn’t too tough and, thanks to Let’s Encrypt, it’s free.
Sal May 13th, 2018
Posted In: AWS
Great Alternatives to AWS S3 Static Site Hosting
Amazon’s S3 is a great tool for hosting static sites for nearly free (and often times free). Setting up a website in S3 takes just a few minutes, and once it’s there it’s secure, scalable, and affordable. That said, it’s not the tool for everyone — like AWS, S3 has many quirks and it has a real learning curve. Also AWS support is far from free and if you want to do anything non-standard, like URL redirects, there can be many headaches. So here are some of the best alternatives to S3 static site hosting for every user, need, and budget.
Sal May 2nd, 2018
Posted In: AWS
Tags: Alternatives To, Hosting, S3, Static Website
How to Redirect to HTTPS Using CloudFront
If you have followed CloudConfusing’s previous guides on hosting a website on S3 and then adding HTTPS to that site, forcing HTTPS is surprisingly easy. The whole process will take about two minutes per site and involves no risk factors, assuming your HTTPS setup is already functioning properly.
Sal April 28th, 2018
Posted In: AWS
Tags: CloudFront, Hosting, HSTS, HTTPS, Lambda, Lambda@Edge