A few years ago my friend and I did a kayak trip around Menorca Island and documented the whole experience. I put together a site to showcase the results and this past month I spent some time rebuilding and moving it to a completely different stack.

Back in the days I used to do a lot of stuff with PHP, especially with Symphony and later Laravel. While I have nothing against these frameworks I thought it would be cool to move MenorKayak to something that I currently use on a daily-basis such as Django. It was also a good opportunity to update the front-end to something more modern.

The new site is built using:

• Django
• Redis (cache)
• PostgreSQL
• Skel
• Amazon S3 (media and static bucket)
• Theme based on HTML5 Story

The whole codebase is public and available in this Github repository.

The site runs on a $5 per month DigitalOcean droplet and it's deployed using CodeShip, which has a free plan that works ace for some of my personal projects. As an extra I set a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. They have a useful tutorial for first-time users that might help some of you.

If you want to know more about any of the mentioned tools and technologies don't hesitate to drop me a line.

And if you're planning a kayak mission to Menorca Island and you're in need of tips, I'll be happy to share some extra information.

Enjoy!