In the beginning there was coffee, S3 and Publii...

So, as a newly minted AWS-SAA  with not much hands on experience I decided to start a blog using S3 static website hosting as a pet project. The goal is to detail my cloud exploits and help with learning and knowledge retention. If someone else finds the content helpful that would be fantastic... But anyway, the actuall process of setting up a site went something like this:

1. Decide on S3 static website hosting (Netlify was also considered and is a great choice but I wanted to stay in the AWS ecosystem for reasons)
2. Pick a static site generator - the thing that I could use to manage content. 
3. Register a domin name. 

After browsing the curated options on StaticGen it was evident that 99% of them require Linux + other prereqs, like being a graybeard and compile your own kernel...j/k :). I didn't want to go through all that yak shaving and simply needed something that:

1. ran on Windows
2. didn't need python, chocolatey or other stuff
3. had GUI and I could start using within minutes of install.

Enter Publii. It ticked all the boxes and as a bonus, the people behind it have published a very comprehensive guide on setting up your S3 bucket (as well as Google Cloud and Netlify) and getting Publii to push content to it.

Gotchas:

The bucket name and the domain name you register must be the same.

Example:

bucket name: thebucket.com domain name: thebucket.com