What makes this Website Tick

2011-11-30

This website is generated with jekyll and hosted on Amazon S3 but how does this all work together?

First off there is jekyll, a blog aware static site generator. What jekyll does is it takes input files written in HTML, Markdown or Textile and applies a HTML template with liquid. The result of this is a fully static website.

Since the input to jekyll is mostly text files, it applies itself to put the files into source control. In my case I used git. As backup and for posterity I push the changes to a public repository hosted by github. If a team would maintain the website, this would be the main means how changes to the website are shared.

To get the generated website to Amazon S3, you "just" need to upload everything to your bucket. Since this is error prone, I use jekyll-s3 which does the task for me. Currently jekyll-s3 will upload everything, but it is in the works to make it upload only changed files. For obvious security reasons the only thing I do not put under source control is the configuration for jekyll-s3, "_jekyll-s3.yml".

Does this solution scale? First off, S3 itself can take quite a beating before it starts to slow down. But should I become a Internet celebrity over night the strategy is clear, I would use Amazon Cloud Front. Cloud Front works by distributing your content from a central sever to "edge nodes" distributed over the globe and it works especially well with Amazon S3.

If you look at most content on the Internet, it is read only. True social media site change this a bit, but the primary content is still some form of blog, article or product page. The only common dynamic part are comments. Comments can be implemented with services such as disqus. Actually this page had disqus comments that I removed because they where seldom used. The way this works is that disqus operates a server that receives, stores and produces the comments, all your site needs is a bit of Java Script code.

All in all I would say that a jekyll powered site on Amazon S3 can power almost any site, from small to large, serving mostly static content.