Website updates

As you know, when I am satisfied with a setup in terms of apps, services, and everything technology-related, it just means that it’s time to break everything and start anew.

For a while, I’ve settled on a few great apps, continued using and recommending some other excellent tools, while consolidating my love for the rest of the services that have left me perfectly happy for the past couple of years.

In the last two or three weeks, I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions specifically about the services/software I use for the website itself. Some of the decisions listed below have been quite the pickle, but I figured I’d share the reasons behind them in a new post. That is, if I manage to finish writing it before I change my mind again.

New domain registrar, DNS provider (and CDN service, maybe)

I have nothing negative to say about Cloudflare and the service they offer; my experience with them has been stellar. Cloudflare has also been my domain registrar of choice since 2022, and it has worked just as well. However, a little voice inside my head kept whispering to me: “They are already a huge company, with so much data and power over the web you love so much… Can’t you avoid them?”

Therefore, as this website will soon celebrate the fifth anniversary of its new name,¹ I decided to give a chance to other, smaller companies, somehow more deserving of my attention. My domains are now registered with Infomaniak. The DNS is provided by Bunny: I am not a big fan, mostly because of the ubiquitous rabbit drawings — which I find a bit silly — but their services appear to be pretty good and are labelled as “the interesting alternative” in my head. Bunny also doubles as a CDN service, which I may activate as soon as this week to speed things up, but I’m not even sure this site needs a CDN in the first place (I still use one to proxy the few images on this site).

The move has been very complicated, as I believe it always is when switching domain registrars. My websites have therefore been offline quite frequently over the past couple of days, accumulating a non-negligible number of errors, from “too many redirections” to SSL issues (sorry about that).

Now, everything is almost good: just a minor issue with the 404 page on Safari, which, for some reason, wants to be downloaded instead of displayed. Despite excellent support from Bunny, it has all been very frustrating. I already miss the efficiency of Cloudflare.

Git instead of Dropbox

To make things as lean as possible, I got rid of my Dropbox account.² All the updates made to Blot are now done via Git, directly from the Terminal app, which I can neatly trigger via a BBEdit script. This may sound very nerdy and not really in line with the “don’t think about it” approach of Blot, where the OG Dropbox sync handles all the changes made to files in the background very elegantly, so the user only has to think about saving documents. Dropbox provides the best and ideal Blot experience for sure, but it requires the creation of a third-party account, unlike Git.

Spending so much time playing around with static site generators like Hugo, Zola, Astro, and Eleventy has made me much more comfortable using the versioning tool Git and the Terminal. A part of me didn’t want this new knowledge to go to waste and be forgotten, hence the switch. I am now extremely impressed by how fast Blot updates via Git: I want to say five times faster than with Dropbox, which was already very fast. It’s bonkers.

I still find a good part of how Git operates a bit ridiculous for a project where one works alone, but I obviously understand why it is built like this. If I had to input commands one by one to commit and push changes, I would have kept Dropbox. But since I can do everything needed with only one click/shortcut on BBEdit, I almost prefer it: this extra layer of commands now necessary to avoid accidental publishing — which can happen easily with Dropbox if you’re not careful — is kinda nice.

Hello Eleventy

Like I mentioned, I have spent so much time playing around with static site generators in the past couple of months. Dozens of hours filled with frustrations, joys, glorious Eureka moments, and painful “want-to-throw-the-laptop-away” moments. In my post about SSGs, I shared the link to the Eleventy version of the Jolly Teapot, which I maintained as a mirror site, a playground to work on while I ironed out the few remaining imperfections, as one would want to finish a video game to 100%.

As you probably guessed by now, you’re looking at the Eleventy site. To my surprise, a few readers already noticed this past weekend.

I want to call this Eleventy blog an experiment. It may last a few days, a few weeks, a few months, or even a few years; who knows? I will keep the Blot version around and fully up to date for the foreseeable future, just in case I want to switch back, which again, may happen as soon as I publish this post.

Blot is a truly fantastic website building tool, and, as you know, I am a big fan. Since the day I switched from Squarespace to Blot back in March 2020 (a month that we will all remember), I have learned so much about HTML and CSS, thanks to Blot and the way it works, the way it allows users to do whatever they want while keeping everything as simple as possible.

Blot is indeed amazing, but at the same time, while I just turned 40 years old, I feel that I am at the point in my blogging life where I need to be fully in charge of my own website, from the control over software to the choice of hosting. That’s why I decided to give Eleventy a go. We will see how long this new setup lasts.

Later, I may share more details about how everything works. If you spot any bugs or problems with this version of the site, please let me know. I’m already aware of an issue with the 404 error and Safari, but I hope it will be fixed soon.³ In the meantime, you will find a better search page and much improved footnotes if you read the site via RSS.

New “uses” page

As this post demonstrates, I tend to switch a little too often when it comes to apps, services, or anything in between. Why? Because it’s easy, cheap, and never really consequential, unlike hardware.

So, as a better way for me to keep track of what I use and to offer me a way to quickly comment on most of these little changes, I’ve created one of these /uses pages, initiated by Wes Bos. There it is. I will try to add more details to it on a regular basis, like I try to do with my “now” page.

Now let’s hope these changes will be the most consequential of the week…