I've gooooooglified
rickmode.com. The site is no longer hosted on a generic cheap crowded shared server. This will save me roughly $80 per year. Woo hoo.
I designed the new site roughly like my old one, but simplified and using some neat tricks for gradient box edges (CSS3 styles which don't show up on Internet Explorer).
Read on for more geeky bits...
I'm using
Google Apps Standard Edition giving me Gmail support for my rickmode.com emails. The main site is Python application running on
Google app engine. The Google Apps domain allows me to configure the Google app engine application to use the www.rickmode.com address. Due to the way Google handles domain names in their cloud infrastructure, the naked rickmode.com domain forwards to
www.rickmode.com. In my opinion, losing the use of the "naked" domain is a small price to pay in return for no system administration and the added resiliency from the Google infrastructure... not to mention the nice price of
free.
I've also moved my blog from a self-hosted WordPress blog to Blogger. So now I no longer need to keep up with WordPress security updates (even better) the blog can handle high traffic. I may lose some flexibility however I happen to like the design of the Blogger templates. Blogger also supports using your own domain names, allowing me to use
blog.rickmode.com rather than the rickmode.blogspot.com default.
My main page pull in the top three blog entries using the
Blogger Data API, which uses the
Google Data Protocol. This only took about 40 lines of code, including imports and the HTML template bits.
All this still requires my own domain registration of
rickmode.com with full DNS control. So for about $10 per year and a bit of work, I have a custom web site with tight integration to a blog, all with no infrastructure headaches. I can concentrate on developing rather than system administration.
Cloud, FTW!
