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Can't run Scripting News on Amazon S3

By Dave Winer on Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 10:53 AM.

To review, Scripting News is mostly a static site with a few dynamic bits. All of them connected into the site via JavaScript includes. So theoretically the whole site could be moved into Amazon S3 using their new ability to specify an index file for a bucket (and it's sub-folders). 

However, there are two problems, and I think the second one is a deal-stopper. 

1. The inability to point scripting.com at the bucket. It must be a sub-domain because it must be a CNAME. I refuse to redirect scripting.com to www.scripting.com for religious reasons, although most others probably wouldn't mind. People I respect would. So I could use s3.scripting.com, which I kind of like. Anil Dash asked a question I hadn't thought of. You're putting someone else's brand on your site. Yeah. It's like "S3 brings you scripting.com." Seems they should have to pay for that. And further, it's an ad and I don't do ads here. But on the other side, it says very clearly to everyone who cares that this is an S3-hosted site, and so they know that if it works they should credit Amazon, and if it doesn't. Since this is a site with a large focus on people who develop for the web, it seems appropriate. So, all-in-all, this is an issue, there is no ideal solution, but there are workable ones.  

2. Scattered through the folders are .htaccess files, that correct mistakes, glue the site to other sites, all around serve as a method of patching a site that's been around a long time, since 1994. There's a lot of that kind of patching in there. Of course S3 sees an .htaccess file as just another thing to serve up. So if I redirected scripting.com to s3.scripting.com, who knows what kind of hell would break loose. I don't remember all the things I patched this way over the years. I know the site works reasonably well. So I guess the bottom-line is that while I don't want to run Apache myself, this site needs to be served by Apache or something that emulates it. It seems that, unless I think of something else, S3 is for hosting new sites, not ones that have been around for a while.