Hosting

Introducing Station Finder

A Cloudflare hosted single page application.

James Montgomery

4 minute read

After migrating my blog to Cloudflare Pages, I wanted to run an application exclusively using Cloudflare products. Inspiration struck on a journey where I was low on fuel in the car. Introducing Station Finder Station Finder is a single-page application. The goal was to provide a means to locate a fuel station. Initially, you select a postcode and choose from a dynamically populated list of station results. A station selection updates the objects on the page to reflect the station choice.

Migrating to Cloudflare Pages

Moving from Cloudflare as a proxy to Cloudflare as my hosting platform.

James Montgomery

5 minute read

TL; DR I recently decided to evaluate Cloudflare as a static site hosting provider. This post covers my findings and migration from AWS Amplify. Amplify Overview The Amplify configuration is unchanged from the previous migration post. The website is statically generated content built with Hugo (noted as Hugo assets in the diagram). Cloudflare provides a proxy to save on bandwidth and provide a CDN function. Besides providing hosting for ja.mesmontgomery.co.uk, Amplify provides several redirects.

Migrating site to AWS

Moving to AWS Amplify and Cloudflare.

James Montgomery

2 minute read

TL; DR Some time ago, I decided to multi-cloud my site. I’ve recently decided to revert to a single cloud hosting provider. I’m taking the opportunity to experience Amplify static hosting for this site. Challenges with the previous configuration Multiple hosting locations meant multiple build processes. In effect, the site was built, deployed (to Firebase) then rebuilt and redeployed (to AWS). Admittedly, the latter was rarely an overhead as the AWS Amplify CI/CD workflow was triggered upon commit to the master branch on CodeCommit.

Domain migration and enabling DNSSEC

I migrated my domain to iwantmyname.com and enabled DNSSEC on CloudFlare.

James Montgomery

3 minute read

TL; DR The renewal date on my .co.uk domain was nearing. I decided to make a change from 123-reg to iwantmyname. After migration, I captured the process to enable DNSSEC when using Cloudflare for DNS. For those thinking of a similar migration, I have also documented my experience of moving to iwantmyname. .co.uk domain registrar migration to iwantmyname I had used iwantmyname previously and so benefitted from having an account already.

Updating site privacy settings

Working with Hugo privacy configuration.

James Montgomery

2 minute read

TL; DR I’ve been reviewing the available Hugo privacy settings. You can review the latest configuration on my site project page. Below I discuss the purpose of the changes. Do not track I’ve updated my Hugo site configuration to respect “do not track” (DNT) browser settings in Google Analytics. The effect is similar to browsing a site in private or incognito mode, which if you used previously blocked Google Analytics.

Duel stack life - exchanging momentum for speed

The need for speed - analysing the speed differences in AWS vs GCP

James Montgomery

5 minute read

TL; DR I knew duel stacking this site would introduce some challenges. In this case, I found myself chasing speed demons at the expense of a focus on other project time. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it - however, there’s a lesson in there. Multi-cloud thoughts This site is a project which began on the one hand as a reason to explore the GCP Firebase hosting product. Extending it to AWS has added a dimension to it whilst still being relevant to the project itself.