I have been following Hollie for a while, since her small good things website has been such a joy to read whenever it popped up in my feeds.
At some point she rebuilt her site from scratch using HTML-only. She wasn’t a programmer and didn’t understand static site generators, so there were problems. The result of this was that all her older posts were now gone! And her new RSS feed with only a few posts showed no article content either.
I remember asking her about it, and she was struggling to keep the RSS feed updated1 manually, so it was pretty bare bones to reduce maintenance. She was planning to bring back her archive at some point though, which made me happy.
A couple days ago, she moved to Eleventy, and I couldn’t be happier! She got a gist of how an SSG works, and she did so with the help of her friends, who have been there for support and questions she might have.
So, in the end, I’ve decided I can do this. And that it’s okay to ask friends for the absolutely inevitable help I’ll need to build/modify something using code I don’t know how to read.
People like that are a wonderful thing, so I too wanted to say thanks, to all of those who have helped me with my site in one way or another. From letting me know of any bugs, to writing guides that I’ve followed in the past, to just having cool website designs that I can copy to my own inspire me!
Honestly, there’s a lot of people and tutorials I’ve followed over the years, to change so many things in my site and improving little by little, so a big thanks to:
There is a lot of other people who have reached out multiple times, when my RSS feeds breaks, when some image or text goes out of bounds, or when I have a typo somewhere. And a lot of others who have inspired me to improve, to write about something and to keep going on this little blogging thing I got going on.
And of course, there are some who have been kind enough to even donate to me from time to time, that’s just wild!
Well, anyway, thanks y’all, and congrats Hollie for taking the step to try a static site generator!
No big deal, I just fetched the full article content with FreshRSS and called it a day! ↩
Some of them were related to my feed organization struggles, some of them are about my thoughts on constantly seeking entertaining, a few others, old friends, and people I’ve emailed before, all of them were really nice to read. ^^
This was a nice way to remember that there’s people who read me, and it has encouraged me to keep on writing for those who have found me worthy. It’s nice to know that it’s not just bots crawling around my archives, but real human beings surfing the web and seeking to interact and communicate with each other.
I know I didn’t ask for your permission, but I am giving a shout-out to y’all anyway. Thanks for reaching out via email, the conversations have been great!
If you reached out and I didn’t mention you, I am sorry, please let me know!
Knowing that I’ve also inspired some people to create websites, and to participate in challenges and respond to my posts with their own articles, brings me joy! I’ve tried to read what I can, and to send emails back as well.
This is what the web is all about.
This is day 66 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Now I want to be honest here, after investigating a little more, due to some information that Kev let me know in the previous blog’s mastodon post, it looks like free *.ml domains can be renewed for free, they will just send me an email two weeks before the expiration date, and I should be able to keep using the domain that way basically forever.
However, the domain itself is not really mine, its just that they let me use it. So I have quite a lot of things I could do, and I still don’t know which path to follow.
I will probably pay to keep this domain properly for myself. I already have a bit of history with it, so, for the sake of keeping it alive, I will own it properly and pay for it, which comes with some more advantages than just renewing it for free each year.
Now, with the amount of money I got I can keep paying for it a few years, but I also plan on getting some other domains for myself, be it for projects I wanna build, maybe a Spanish only website, or a more professional website to show during job interviews, who knows.
I think I can even get a cheap VPS for a couple of years, which would actually be pretty cool, something I never thought I could afford by myself during these times.
Thank you all guys, seriously. Knowing that my website will probably be up for decades fills me with quite a lot of joy, my own little corner in the internet, alive and well for years to come.
Also, while writing this, I realized that there are some old snapshots of the begginings of my website, stored in the Internet Archive, so in case you want to see how it started, the oldest backup is from less than one month after I got started, feel free to take a look!.
I have done blogs before, but nothing like this, I hope this remains for the next decades, I am still young, to think I will be able to see how this evolves over time, it will be simply awesome, I can’t thank you enough for what you all inspired me to do, and all that has happened since I joined Fosstodon, this challenge, and the FOSS movement in general.
This almost feels like the end of the challenge, but it is not, there are still 10 more days to go!
This has been day 90 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge. Thank you for reading, and thank you for helping me out.
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