Setting Up This Site: Day Two

02/09/2024    

Beyond a Blank Page

Once I had a webserver up and running in the cloud, I needed some actual web pages. Luckily there are a lot of templates available online.

PHPJabbers.com

PHPJabbers.com has a number of templates for webpages. I ended up picking one of their Blog templates after a lot of searhing through the web. If this site looks similar to others you've seen before, that will be why!

SCP and PPK to PEM Conversion

In order to get the template uploaded to my webserver I wanted to use SCP. However the key I had made from AWS for connecting to my machine was a PuTTY compatible PPK file rather than the SCP compatible PEM file that I needed. After some searching on the internet I found that you can use the PuTTYGen program that installs along with PuTTY to do this as per: https://mydailyfindingsit.blogspot.com/2015/08/create-keys-for-your-linux-machine.html.

Chmod 400 In Windows Subsystem for Linux

My next challenge was that I was unable to change the permissions for my PEM key in WSL to read only. Amazon EC2 Linux does not allow this as a security feature. No matter how many times I tried "sudo chmod 400 KeyName.pem" the changes would not happen. Luckily I found the solution to this problem at: https://superuser.com/a/1343737.

Lots of Deleting

If I'm honest, the first part of adapting the template to meet my needs involved holding down the d key in vi. I'm not even sure that I've properly removed all the code that I don't need. But at least I've removed enough of it to have started out with a nice clean slate.

Filling In Content

After having got rid of what I didn't need, it was time to start populating the site with what I did want. That involved some actual writing, like this post you are reading right now.