I’ve finally gotten around to finishing up the Jekyll setup and uploading the finished 1st post. It seems that unless you need the social intergration of something like Tumblr or are experimenting with newer ideas like Medium or SVBTLE, Jekyll+S3 has become the default blogging platform. It’s relatively easy to set up and since it doesn’t come with any default themes or layouts implicitly encourages clean and simple layouts.
One silly issue that I spent a few days battling was my DNS setup tomake sure I can use the direct at least partially due to me missing a very obvious portion of the S3 static site setup instructions. Instead of setting my CNAME to point to the specific S3 AWS Region (US East 1), I used the generic s3.amazonaws.com url. It would happily render www.pushtostack.com/index.html but would throw up an Access Denied when I tried to hit the root url (www.pushtostack.com). Very annoying and mysterious, at least to me.
Unfortunately, the S3 documentation includes a page specifically for the CNAME portion of your website setup which is somewhat misleading.
