Boone Putney bio photo

Boone Putney

Software Development
Random Musings
Austin, Texas

HumanPlanet Soleer

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Platform Information

This site is implemented via a pretty cool technology stack which allows a ridiculously fast, scalable, and cost-effective serving of the site. For the last decade or so, I’ve been leaning on server side technologies because of the end-user benefits and efficiencies they bring. It’s interesting to go back to serving static files, albeit in a much more advanced method than what I was using in the early days of the internet.

For this site, all pages are static html, generated via the Pelican Static Site Generator, which is written in Python. There are a number of other options out there, but I’ve been doing more Python/Django work recently and wanted to try one of the Python-based options, and Pelican seemed to be the most actively maintained and have the largest following, according to StaticGen.

The Pelican theme we are using is based on Bootstrap3, and all possible scripts and stylesheets for jQuery & Bootstrap are served via CDN wherever possible. We’re also replacing functionality that might normally be performed server-side with 3rd party APIs like Disqus and AddThis.

With this setup, there is no server-side logic required. With a single command, all html files are generated, the changes are pushed to my git repository, and all changes are synced with my Amazon AWS S3 bucket for static website serving.