I have recently updated my personal website. I do this every once and a while, but this time I am actually proud of it. I have been working at Koansys, LLC for a little over a year and have really grown in my ability to design websites. It has been a great experience working with a designer and picking up some tips and tricks here and there.
The idea of the website is similar to the last iteration, it is a static website created by a program and hosted online. There is nothing dynamic in the actual hosted code. However, instead of using Jekyll this time, I am using Mynt. I chose Mynt solely due to the fact that it is written in Python, a language I am very comfortable with. This takes away a little of the magic I felt when using Jekyll.
Another thing that changed this iteration is that the website is now hosted on Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3). I use the wonderful command line interface s3cmd which really makes updating the website a breeze. Hosting the website on S3 allows for amazing response times and is really cheap to host. It is a win-win scenario.
The only real catch that I came across when setting up this website was adding the cacheing headers. s3cmd allows you to do this, it is just not intuitive. Below is the command that I run to update this website:
$ s3cmd sync --add-header='Cache-Control: max-age=31536000' _site/ s3://BUCKET-NAME-HERE
I highly recommend going with a static site generator, your site will never be faster.