Indeed it can! This is quite cool, because this means that Blogofile sites can be run without the need for a full webserver, and will only cost mere pennies per month for the more meager and less-trafficked sites. This is even more of a boon for security reasons: no more maintenance of server patches if all you're doing is running a blog.

I uploaded a test Blogofile site using S3Fox, and although it was a little cumbersome, it worked! For use with Blogofile on a more permanent basis, I want something I can run from the command line and also be scriptable, so I wrote a python app to do the job: Vaporfile.

Vaporfile uploads static websites to the cloud.

You can see the installation and usage instructions over on the github page, but here's a rough gist:

$ vaporfile create

This starts a wizard to configure a website. You configure the S3 bucket name, the local path that contains the website, and other config parameters. The main reason for using a wizard rather than command line arguments is because of the nasty possibility of deleting your entire website because of the wrong command line parameters. All the configuration is stored and loaded from a JSON file in your home directory, ~/.vaporfile, which can also be edited by hand if needed.

$ vaporfile upload <name-of-website>

This synchronizes all of the files in the configured website folder on your local machine to the S3 bucket. Any files that are new or have changed (based on md5 sum) are uploaded. Any files that have been deleted locally are deleted from the server (unless you specify --no-delete).

$ vaporfile list

This lists all the websites you've configured along with their local locations.

$ vaporfile credentials store

This lets you reconfigure your AWS credentials.

$ vaporfile credentials delete

This removes your AWS credentials completely.

That's it in a nutshell. And in case it's not obvious, Vaporfile is not specific to Blogofile; it will upload any old website to S3, because that's all Blogofile sites are, just plain static HTML content.

Later on, this will probably also be wrapped into a Blogofile plugin for ease of use, but I wanted to get this out there sooner rather than later, because it's just that cool :)