The Good Old Internet

It has been over 25 years now since I have had this website online. It used the old domain all of those years until now. I wasn’t creative enough when I purchased that old domain and jumped on the impulse buy of the .org domain. I wasn’t thrilled with it all these years, but never bothered to change it.

Early on, when I did the HTML by hand, I thought it would be more trouble than it was worth to move domains. I had registered this domain a few years back for something else that I never really did, so when I realized it was just sitting there, I thought it would be appropriate to move my now blog to this domain.

It’s very fitting for how I do things. Sure, I use some modern technology on here, like fancy CSS. I keep things simple, though. I am proud of the fact that there is no tracking at all. There are no cookies. I do not use JavaScript just because I can, so there aren’t dozens of black hole frameworks imported. Sure, I could find a use for scripting some day, but I won’t make it a requirement. I won’t add to the enshittification.

I had actually considered doing it when I moved away from WordPress and switched to Hugo. Hugo had such a steep learning curve, though I decided not to. I wanted to keep all of my old stuff and did the same moving to Zola and even moving to this new URL. Now that I have a good grasp on static site generators, it was easy to do. Just changing a few things and removing a few old and irrelevant references to deth by hand.

It was a simple thing to do and took less time than it did to do just one page way back when I had used to manually write the HTML, and that was so repetitive. I think it actually took longer to rsync it the site to the new do folder than it did to do the main editing. Have I mentioned how annoying the drastically slower upload speed is on cable internet than the download? Fiber can’t get here soon enough.

I guess in hindsight I could have logged in via ssh and either used either mv or cp to do it more quickly. At least in theory then rsync would have either uploaded the changes in should have skipped all the images.

It is not as if I even planned this change. I have not really even given it much thought. For some reason, I just decided to do it this morning while I was drinking my coffee. I do this sort of thing every so often. It’s the beauty of this really only being a hobby site.

While doing my other preparations, I changed a few paths on the weather stuff to something a little cleaner now that I realize I can set the path in Zola’s front matter. I figured it was the best time to do it. Of course, I set up .htaccess redirects from the old paths to the new. That weather data is something I could see being useful to others. I did have to have a quick refresher on how to set up those rules after self hosting Caddy for years.