This first post is about how it came to be. A bit philosophical, I know, but that’s the nature of tech sometimes..

This is a version of wordpress (free blog engine) installed in Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing – or Elastic Computing Cloud – or something like that, starting with Elastic and then another two “C” words) (free). Which I think is both thrifty, and tekky geeky, and therefore pretty awesome.

Inspired by Jaimal’s post over on 2bit-coder and an email from Amazon about a free tier, I set about having a go.

The only things needed to change from Jaimal’s tutorial, are that the current free versions of the AWS Linux VM are not quite Fedora; although you do install using yum, you need to log in as “ec2-user” instead of “root”, you always have to whack a “sudo” in front of any command that needs any real privileges, and you can’t use “phpmyadmin” to set up your mysql instance for wordpress, so you have to go old skool and do it by hand.

Anyhoo. Introductions over, next up – more on random web-related tech to follow.

Semi-related references:

How to run WordPress on the NSLU2 (“hacked” router I own that I based some of the wordpress install and setup on)

Mercurial how-to (since I’ve also installed that on my EC2 instance and will follow up on that at some point)