Daily Goals – Use Amazon Lightsail to Launch a WordPress blog; Redirect my domain randybuilds.com from static S3 website to Lightsail WordPress blog

Today I decided to kill two birds with one stone, per se.

Task #1 – Use Amazon Lightsail, pre-configured with WordPress, to transition my Learning Log content from a simple Word document into a WordPress blog.

Task #2 – Redirect requests for my domain randybuilds.com to my WordPress blog and away from an S3 bucket I had configured previously for static website hosting.

Amazon Lightsail offers easy-to-use, cost-effective virtual private servers that are essentially pared down EC2 instances with limited administrator functionality. The service was designed with non-technical users in mind and allows you to select from a variety of pre-configured blueprints for Linux and Windows instances, containers, storage, and databases. Since I only needed to host a basic blog-style website, I figured a simple Linux instance configured with a WordPress blueprint was the perfect service for this use case. The less time I had to spend configuring and deploying this blog, the more time that could be spent learning exam-specific material.

For the time being a blog format suits my needs the best. I am finding it hard, at least at this stage in my learning , to have a traditional portfolio website. For example, since much of my learning and development focuses on more back-end related tasks, I cannot show off a cool new UI or web application that I just built. At least not most of the time. Often, the necessary steps have me going through a checklist of configuration settings in the management console or running command line scripts and getting some nerdy text output in the terminal. So the best way for me to communicate all of this to the world is through a blog.