Derek Sivers kicked off a movement of people publishing Now pages on their websites to share what they’re focused on right now, and I think that’s a cool idea, so here’s mine!
Welp, I can finally check off that “update now page” todo item I’ve had since May. 😂
Happy Fall, Y’all! (or Spring if you’re down under!)
I actually have a very nerdy update for y’all. Earlier in the summer I wrote about my disgust at GitHub’s “pivot to AI” and said I was in the process of migrating as much of my code as possible to Codeberg.
Fast forward a couple of months, and that process is well underway. Not only have I migrated a number of code repositories over, I’ve also transferred a number of my Bridgetown (yay for the v2 release! 🎉) websites over as well. I’d already had “mirrors” of the GitHub repos on Codeberg, but because I was using Render as my hosting company, I couldn’t completely ditch GitHub (Render doesn’t support forges other than GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket). I was at a loss how to resolve this.
Until now! 🎉
Thanks to the wonderful folks at statichost.eu, a newcomer to the scene based in—yep, you guessed it—the EU, I’ve been able one-by-one to move my sites off of Render and use statichost.eu instead for my web hosting. I started out with the static-only sites as they’re the easiest, but now I’m starting to wade into the “hybrid” deploys (so called because most of the site is built, aka “prerendered”, and then deployed as a single artifact…but there are also some endpoints which use a dynamic server, aka every request is processed as an application route and the response is served in real-time).
In anticipation of this, I recently hulked out on a big beefy VPS (Virtual Private Server) from Digital Ocean (a “droplet” as they call it). I’d already been using one for all my development work (yes, I’ve been using a “cloud” development environment for ages now…first on a home Mac I owned which I opened to the Internet, now a 24/7 droplet), so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to turn it into a real web server. This is how I host the new Human Web Collective site powered by PieFed, and more sites are coming online…such as this one!
Yes, my dear friends, this very site is now running as a hybrid deploy. All of the pages you see are hosted on statichost.eu, but when you go to click a “Comments” button on an article, that logic is being handled by the API server hosted on my Digital Ocean droplet.
Linux Sysadmin…Again?
You know, a long time ago it was second nature for me to run Linux servers in the cloud for applications. Then somehow I got sucked into the vortex of thinking I should just use managed infrastructure for everything. Now don’t get me wrong, I do like Render very much. But by the time you add up several websites worth of server endpoints in that sort of environment, it’s just as expensive as a single beefy VPS. So if you’re not saving money, are you saving time? Maybe. All I know is, I’m very happy being my own Linux sysadmin again and setting up websites the old-fashioned way. Well maybe not quite as old-fashioned…let’s just say using Caddy for the base server infrastructure is a dream compared to the old days of Apache or even nginx. And I’m enjoying the latest ease of setup via systemd more than anything in the past. I’m at the point now where I can spin up a new Ruby-based service in mere minutes with a canonical repo hosted on Codeberg. How cool is that?! 😎
My list of sites now on statichost.eu/Codeberg:
- JaredWhite.com (obviously!)
- The Internet Review
- That HTML Blog
- Fullstack Ruby
- Yarred
and a growing set of developer-related destinations as well tied to specific projects.
My next big project: I’m doing a complete revamp of my Whitefusion consultancy website, making it both scaled down in terms of “it’s a-me, Jared the developer 🤓” but also much more visually engaging. And yes, it will of course be hosted on Codeberg and statichost.eu. Weeeee!
