New Blog
So I’ve given up on doing my own hosting. It was a fun run, but I’m looking for a more reliable toolchain.
I’ve played with the various static site generators, I still advocate Hugo and Jekyll to a lot of people. For now though, I’m using blot.im.
It’s affordable, it’s managed, and it lets me just write markdown in plaintext which is all I want to do.
For what it’s worth I’ve had legitimately good experiences with every hosting strategy I’ve concieved of, but none of them fit my incredibly lazy workflow.
I started on nearlyfreespeech.net with hand-coded HTML. The host was great, especially back when I started. Their pricing model was very tightly coupled to usage, which I had none of thanks to my incredible laziness and the amount of effort required to tinker in raw HTML. I gave them $20 in 2013 and there’s just under $10 left in the funds for the account today. I’ve certainly never dealt with a more affordable host.
They sought to charge a premium for DNS, so I went and made a Cloudflare account and moved all my DNS there where it remains to this day.
When I finally learned Git it wasn’t long after that I started playing with Jekyll on Github. This was fun and I ended up doing a project for a makerspace hosting their website and blog through that platform.
At some point in the past few years HTTPS became a requirement, with the rise of Lets Encrypt I was happy to add some automation to my Nearly Free Speech setup in order to get that good HTTPS traffic without depending on Cloudflare’s management. This is back to the front of my mind given the move to Blot, I’m not sure what I’ll end up leaning on for HTTPS.
Sometime in the past couple of years I started getting more drawn into Go, which somehow led me to Hugo. I never actually got to the point of publishing anything with Hugo, but in my tinkering with it I found it nice enough.
Now it seems du jour for web developers to create their own static site generators. I’ll admit, I threw some ideas at an editor in that front. Before long, I caught myself rewriting a terrible version of IIS and had to step far away from that project. For now I think it’s wise to leave that to better motivated individuals.
So here I am. Writing Dropbox-synched markdown in Visual Studio Code on my desktop, or in Byword on my iPad. Blot picks up the files and generates the HTML for me. It’s my abhorrently lazy dream.
If I were more bound to the current zeitgeist I might label this page “Colophon” or something. But I grew up on AIM and GeoCities, so we’ll stick with the “New Blog” label for now.