The following is the complete list of site posts, sorted by date.
Since this was originally a project that I developed privately using AWS CodeCommit to host my repositories, it has taken me some time to get repositories cleaned up and documented on GitHub. Most of this work was completed in 2023, but only recently have I had time to get basic documentation prepared. Please read on if you would like to learn about the public versions of these repositories.
AWS CloudFormation Git Sync is a useful new CloudFormation feature which allows you to manage stacks directly from a Git repository. This new feature is possible through a combination of a CodeStar connection, a CloudFormation template (which will define the stack), and a Stack Deployment file which contains parameters for configuring the stack.
Though I have been doing web design since the late 1990s, it has been a while since my primary focus was front-end development. For my new blog, I realized that it would be much faster to either purchase an HTML template or start from a quality free template that already had things like responsive design handled.
In this short post, I will go over where I ended up getting the HTML template for my blog and why.
This is a post in the "Blog on a Budget" series.
Before picking 11ty as my Jamstack solution, I realized that I may need to create some tools that help with content and site creation. I wasn't sure if I would also be doing posts on other blogging sites, but I was sure that I would need to produce thumbnails for my blog posts, and I wanted a universal solution.
I decided to create a simple Jamstack Website Tools GitHub repository where I could group tools that I use for content and site development.
This is a post in the "Blog on a Budget" series.
To keep the hosting of my blog simple and affordable, I decided that I would prefer a static site. I had read about Jamstack solutions for static site generation and I felt this would be a good solution. You get the speed of a static site on the consumer side and the benefits of a dynamic site on the development side.
This is a post in the "Blog on a Budget" series.
Earlier this year I decided it was time to finally get around to creating a personal blog. This has been a goal for a while, but was always hard to make the time.
I could have just purchased a cheap WordPress blog hosting plan somewhere and started blogging, but where is the fun in that? I decided to go another route.
As I thought about what I wanted this overall solution to look like (besides being done affordably), I came up with some general goals and requirements.
This is a post in the "Blog on a Budget" series.
When you set up a new AWS account, you start out with only a root user account. You rarely want to use the root user account due to security concerns for your account. It is better to create at least one IAM user that you use for day-to-day administrative activities. In this post we will go over how to create an administrator IAM account. In this case, we will also set up CodeCommit credentials for this new IAM user.
This post assumes that you only have a root user for your AWS account.
This is a post in the "Blog on a Budget" series.
When you set up a new AWS account, the first user that is created is your root user. This user should rarely be used and should be secured as much as possible (since it has full access to everything in your new account). Besides a strong password, you should always set up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for the root user. This post will go over how to set up MFA using the AWS console for the root user.
This is a post in the "Blog on a Budget" series.
When setting up a new AWS account for personal or small business use, it is important to set up some basic billing budgets to ensure you are alerted if costs start going higher than you have budgeted. Nobody wants a huge surprise cloud bill at the end of the month; there are some real nightmare examples of this situation if you search for it.
In this case, I need an AWS account to host my blog (and related infrastructure).
This is a post in the "Blog on a Budget" series.
Slack is a useful tool for communication, but there are a number of features that are easy to overlook.
In this post I am going to go over a number of features that I use in Slack each day at work. I bring these up because a number of my coworkers have indicated they do not currently use many of them.
I do not generally consider myself a naturally organized person. However, over the years I have had to work to try to get more organized due to the demands of full-time work and a family.
I use a number of tools and practices at work to try to keep organized (and more productive). I am not always successful, but I am better than I was years ago. Here I will list out some of the tools and practices that I use to keep organized.