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Guide to Creating Static Websites On App Engine

A quick guide to hosting a static site using Google AppEngine's Standard Environment
April 25th, 2014  by Blaine Garrett

I'm working on an "absolute primer guide" to creating a static website on Google App Engine using Google Cloud Platform. You can help make it great!

Firstly, check out the guide here. I eventually want to make this so non-programmers (like my wife) can feel comfortable creating their first site. I'm not a technical writer and I would love for people to contribute. You can make pull requests against the repository to suggest changes. 

So What's the Skinny? Why Write Such an Oversimplified Guide?
Now that Issue 777 is resolved, you can point a domain name to your Google App Engine project without having to first set it up through Google Apps. This was a major pain point previously to get a site up and running on App Engine. Along with the latest changes to the Google Cloud Platform interface, I predict a lot of people will flock to Google Appengine as a hosting solution - especially designers, front end devs, and people who need rapid prototypes. Most of these people will just need static websites.

App Engine does a ton of things and the documentation can be daunting even for me. Also, since App Engine is geared toward sites that require programming languages to talk to their architecture, it is not intuitive to use it as normal web hosting account as you would with Apache running on Rackspace, Linode, Dreamhost, etc. To code up a static website and toss it on "the cloud" is daunting for most people - even the tech savvy.

 For this reason, I started writing the "absolute primer guide". 

So Why Have a Git Hub Project?
I created the gae-static git repo mostly so that I had a starting point for throwing together a new site from scratch. The plan was to throw in all the starting assets like Bootstrap, Font Awesome, etc. Then when I go to make a new site, I can just clone the repo and have a new project running quickly. While putting this together, I realized this would be valuable for others and started writing the help guide. It is content I was going to originally add to this blog, and I still may eventually.

Sounds Good, But I Found Typos or It Needs Some Technical Copy Editing
I'm not much of a technical writer, but I'd like to improve. Your suggestions to the guide are welcome. In the ideal world, you would make pull requests against my repo to suggest changes. If this is all Greek to you, that is fine, post your suggestions in the comments of this post. 

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