Comments. I’ve written about them before, two times — but here we go again.

Long story short; I’ve spent some time thinking about adding comments, and think it might be time to give it another try. Why now? As my traffic numbers have gone up, so has the emails from readers. I don’t get a lot — by any measure, but I do get some with very good insight about the post.

I’d like to share that knowledge, but reworking it into the article is not always so easy. With a comment section; they could be put on display 🙂

I’m hosting this blog on AWS S3 and Cloudfront. One disadvantage with S3 is that it doesn’t have a simple way of creating redirects — like Netlify, Firebase, or even Nginx.

But there is way; using the AWS CLI, put-object, and the x-amz-website-redirect-location metadata.

Here’s how 👇

This blog is built with Hugo — an open-source static site generator. Static websites require no server side processing, which makes them easier to host and opens up new hosting possibilities.

There are many options out there, but I deploy my website to AWS S3, using CloudFront to distribute it globally (aka. make it fast).

Here is the why and the how.

I like the concept of blog post series — a large topic or project, broken up in smaller pieces. Easier to write, easier to read.

Here is how I implemented a series taxonomy in Hugo 👇

I’m not a big fan of embedding YouTube videos, it adds a lot of weight to the page and I have limited control over it. It pulls in all kinds of styles, scripts and fonts from multiple domains. YouTube has a nocookie embed option, which is suppose to be privacy-friendly, but who knows.

So if not YouTube — what then? Vimeo is one option, it costs a few coffees per month. But it has some of the same problems as YouTube, as it also uses an iframe.

So I tried some other solutions.