Blogtech

I went crazy trying to find and learn the easiest, yet most flexible technology for creating and serving a blog site. I started in the early days when everything was in hard coded HTML.  The along came CSS and Javascript and all sorts of products like wordpress.  After a lot of experimenting and playing I decided to take the lazy route.  I was familiar with JEKYLL and had built some sites with it, but I am not skilled in Ruby and did not want to learn new languages.  Also I didn't want to spend a lot of time on CSS even though I did want my site to work on any size device.  I kind of got hooked on Pelican which is written in Python, a language I do know.  But that wasn't where I wound up.

I found a great tool called publii which allows posts to be edited in WYSISYG or using Markdown or simple text blocks, so very easy to learn.  But it has the flexibility to add html and customize the css.  And it has some plugins and themes and one can also create their own.  I hope I will find the time to add a few features to my blog as time goes on.

Lastly I needed to host the blog.  Again, many options.  The easiest is to just use github pages which is free, but they would frown on me storing and serving so many images, so I switched to the old standby, Amazon.  Using Amazon S3 for storage was easy, I already is that for backups, but I also needed to understand cloudfront which allows https or secure serving it also caches the content, but I doubt my site will get enough traffic that it matters.  

Anyway, the blog currently is created with publii and served with amazon and publii is free, and my Amazon charges will be under a few dollars a month.

Update December 2025

I am still using publii and still like it a lot.  I have written some (with the help of Claude) some CSS and code to build video galleries.  I had been hosting video on youtube but wanted to get rid of the ads and such so I am moving the videos.  I am storing them on S3 and using mu own html and css to build galleries.

I am also using hostinger as my server instead of Amazon.  While Amazon is very cheap and reliable it was a pain to configure with redirects and https and such.  Hostinger is very simple and publii can easily ftp the images to it.  I also added a domain I had joelmania.com to redirect.  I may do more in the future but for now bermarama and joelmania both point to the same hostinger server. 

I also put up a few servers at home, one for ebooks and one for images.  I use dynu to keep the domain joelberman.net up to date with dns.  I highly recommend immich for anyone who wants a great image/video program in place of the apple or google cloud photo apps.  For ebooks I am using calibre-web which shares the database with the standard calibre program.

If you know me you know I have been a champion of "free" software for many years and I use it as often as I can.  Free as in freedom, I do donate to developers and projects.