Creating a static website with GitHub Pages

I have a bunch of note as html files and want to easily host them somewhere. I’m looking into using GitHub Pages. GitHub pages provide themes, but for html files you need to add a header to the start of each file in markup format using Jekyll Front Matter.

---
layout: default
---

Add a sample test page with a couple of headers and you end up with a page rendered with your selected theme:

Access your site with the url: https://[your-github-user-id].github.io/[repo-name]

New AWS Console with ‘favorites’

I just got prompted to switch to the new AWS Console and found this new feature that I’ve always though would be useful, and now here it it 🙂 You can now flag specific services as your ‘favorites’ and they appear in a ribbon bar across the top of your console and in a widget on the console page. Here’s my 3 ‘favorited’ services in the bar at the top of the console:

If you go to ‘Action’ then ‘Add widgets’ you can also add a favorites section and drag it to a location on your console page:

Here it is at the top of my console page:

Previously we had the ‘Recently visited’ section on the Console, but the items in the list would move around depending which you most recently used. Now with favorites you can pin the services you’re most often using so you can more easily access them.

Mount as EBS volume inside a EC2 instance

By default, if you provision and attach additional EBS volumes for an EC2 instance, they don’t get mounted by default.

The boot EBS is usually /dev/xvda1. Each additional EBS volume should be /dev/xvdb and so on.

First format the new volume:

sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdb

Make a mount mount directory like /data, then mount it with:

sudo mount /dev/xvdb /data

Now you should see the new volume available:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           3.9G  432K  3.9G   1% /run
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/xvda1       20G  8.8G   12G  44% /
tmpfs           798M     0  798M   0% /run/user/1000
/dev/xvdb       7.8G   36M  7.3G   1% /data

Add a line to /etc/fstab to mount on startup:

/dev/xvdb /data ext4 defaults,nofail 0 2

These steps are from multiple places, mainly answers to this question.