Codeberg Pages and Some Other Changes

For someone who hates modern tech, I still take pride in the dwindling amount of tech that I enjoy. This site remains a tiny beacon of love. One that I wish I put more time and effort into, and simultaneously am glad that I don't.

I've left plenty of things slide in the last few months in particular. An increase in journalling has reduced the amount of posting I create here. Various to-do items, some of which I posted on the Home page as a strange source of pride, have withered. Some of this was a natural slide, and some of it came from negligence.

Recently, two more technical items of maintenance popped up. One was that the domain lease was expiring. I only purchase it once per year, exploit the "introductory" rate, then jump ship to the next cheap provider. This year, the leap was from Maxer back to Blacknight, who were my hosting provider two years prior. I don't have much to say about either provider. If they're cheap, they're absolutely fine to deal with.

The other item was that of site hosting. Up to a year ago, I rented some servers for seedbox and website hosting. It was interesting and engaging to start with, but once I got established and comfortable, the hobby became little more than maintenance. This says far more about me than this interest - I could have made far more use of remote servers with dedicated IPs and enormous HDD storage, but chose not to. The signs of burnout were already there.

When I got uncerimoniously booted from Big Tech, I cut costs down, and server rent was an easy item to chop. I moved hosting of Sandy's Palace to GitHub Pages, and thought little of it. When Microsoft, who own GitHub, turned as gleefully nasty^[1] as the rest of the Big Tech bastards, I had to take some form of action. Even if they weren't receiving any money directly from me, being associated with them was too much. I took pride in de-googling myself a few years back, and this was a logical next step.

I took an interest recently in Codeberg. They are established in a European country^[2] , have the capability to host sites via Codeberg Pages, and took a resilient stance in telling AI slop to fuck off. This was more than enough to sway me. In contrast, GitHub's embrace of Copilot, wedging it into every crevice possible, is simply exhausting. The moral choice here was not difficult^[3] .

The migration of my domain host has been completed for the delightfully low cost of €7.37 for one year. Sometimes technology is wonderful in enabling a gay little project like this, allowing anyone around the world with a semblance of tech proficiency to view my silly ramblings, for a tiny price like that. The migration from GitHub Pages to Codeberg Pages being free for my level of usage is perhaps even more impressive.

Though, I'm well aware of where the "free" tier of products inevitably lead companies, or even non-profits, to. Reading Codeberg's last newsletter, they are trying to grow with a shockingly small amount of infrastructure and staff. Perhaps some money being sent their way will be more useful in the long run.

Helped from the motivation of completing the above work, I have another draft of small tweaks I want to make to Sandy's Palace. Mostly just tidying up some dead links, cleaning the home page, before I start building any thoughts of developing this site further. Doing this migration work, and typing up a little summary, has reignited a small amount of interest in tech independence. There is wonderful work being done, and even having proximity to it is fun.