I wanted to simplify deployment for my blog and other sites that only consist of static files and also play with SPDY, which has been in stable nginx since 1.3.15.

If you plan on using SDPY with nginx or currently do, make sure you upgrade to 1.4.7, which corrects a security issue in the ngx_http_spdy_module:

   Security: a heap memory buffer overflow might occur in a worker
   process while handling a specially crafted request by
   ngx_http_spdy_module, potentially resulting in arbitrary code
   execution (CVE-2014-0133).
   Thanks to Lucas Molas, researcher at Programa STIC, Fundación Dr.
   Manuel Sadosky, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Below is a shell script for building a statically compiled binary of nginx 1.4.7 with SPDY. Update the ./configure options to suit your needs. I have left out things I did not need, like proxying and HTTP basic auth.

The only drawback of using stable instead of mainline is that the SPDY version is a bit behind (spdy/2 compared to spdy/3 in mainline). Check out the SDPYCheck results for this blog.

For a nice baseline configuration for nginx with SSL, check out this Gist.