I bounce around from idea to idea. My thoughts don’t come linearly. Especially for website content. I want to write my rough draft, refine it a bit, then put it out in the world. I’ll refine it as I get feedback from the market. This is the way I write content.
I could reserve those ideas until they’re fully fleshed out and perfect. However, much of the time, I don’t return to it. I don’t get feedback so I never return. I like the idea of reiterating over my content. Just put it out there. Refine it. Possibly follow up with a more thorough article or video.
This workflow used to be a pain for separate sites. It’s easy when you post everything to one blog or youtube channel. You already have your pipeline. You can easily pump out more content. Just click new post, or upload that new video to Youtube. When you’re working with a completely new domain name though, it was more of a headache in the past.
There have been easy 1-click site creation services for awhile. The problem is that they generally are easy to setup for one website. You get charged for each site you setup. I have many domains, with many ideas. I don’t like the idea of paying $5-20 per month for each one of them. They all don’t get enough traffic for me to justify that.
Hosting static files is cheap. But, setting up a good workflow was sort of a pain. It took a little upfront cost to setup a highly iterative workflow to upload static files to s3. It’s what kept me from easily releasing new content and ideas.
Aws amplify
I love this. This is a great tool. Just setup your amplify hook for deployment through the web console. It’s all point and click. I don’t need to do much of anything. Now I’m releasing my static sites on a cheap and highly scalable platform with ease.
I’ve turned out three sites in the last seven days. I wouldn’t say they’re polished by any means, but I need to get the ideas out there. The hosting is pennies. It’s really cheap. I can make changes and push my changes to github. Amplify will pick up on the commit hook to master
start building and deploying my new static site.
Super simple deployment. Really inexpensive. Lot’s of ideas for content and sites are tried quickly and I’m able to iterate quickly through them as well.
Give amplify a try if you’re creating static or JAM stack websites. It’s going to put netlify out of business.
My tools for static sites
I’ve been using gatsby.js since I already know react with react-bootstrap
and the gatsby-plugin-google-analytics
plugin. It gives me pre-generated server side rendering (ssr) for good seo and the ability to integrate new data sources at either build time or run time.
- gatsby.js
- react-bootstrap
- amplify