Orchard is a content management system that I’ve been keeping an eye on for just over a year. I installed a 0.8 version and while it was rough around the edges I clicked with it better than my previous attempts to fiddle with a CMS. Currently Orchard is at 1.3 and when I started fiddling with Amazon Web Services I figured that running Orchard on AWS would be a rather fun thing to try.

I’ve managed to get a fair number of things setup:

• This is running on a micro instance on AWS. I’m using a Microsoft created AMI. I used Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install Orchard but I needed to tweak the IIS application settings to get Orchard running smoothly and to stop the CPU usage from spiking. While I could have used static warm up pages it was more sensible to leave IIS and Orchard in memory with a low idle of CPU seeing as AWS doesn’t charge on memory useage.
• Enabled Disqus comments – comments on a blog are an obvious requirement and Disqus allows my readers to keep an established identity without requiring something like Facebook.
• Set up Google Analytics and registered with Google Webmaster Tools.

but I have a to do list that I hope to get done in the next couple of weeks months.

1. Get Orchard to support Authorship Markup with an Author tag on each blog post with a matching rel=”author” link.
2. Create a Responsive Theme with a focus on a mobile first site support.
3. Setup Feedburner with the RSS feed.

I’m not really happy with the Facebook badge and Twitter widget so they’re on the list somewhere.

I suppose I should finish with something about why I’m blogging but I will leave that for a future post along with:

• Fun with Windows 8 on a Samsung Series 7 tablet.
• Trials of a Standing Desk.
• At least one foray into the land of Azure.

and of course my continuing Adventures with AWS, Orchard and Blogging in general. I don’t intend to keep to professional issues but I will be keeping a professional tone and standard.