An Odyssey of hosting platforms
This has been an intermission and a half. Since I was last posting regularly, I have become a permanent consultant, and then become a consulting lead. But in truth, my intermission was not caused by being busy - at least, that wasn't the significant turn of the needle.
My problems were, classically, about the last hurdle of technology, and why we pay people to do things for us, and sometimes feel embarrassed about them.
I consider myself a technology literate person. I've built a computer, disassembled some more. However, I'm also someone from the great engineering tradition of 'fuck it let's try', which led me to rewire lamps and completely remove my kitchen oven, balancing on a bucket, to replace a fan element or some shit which I thought would be a 15 min job (a fifteen minute YouTube video is, of course, a two hour job). What I'm trying to say is, I enjoy giving stuff a go, but I also often fall victim to the eternal tinkerer's "if it ain't broke you haven't messed with it enough", which is what happened here.
FragileData was first hosted on WordPress, because WordPress is alright. The volume of gizmos and buttons is not necessary but it'll do; I wrote my posts, found my theme, even bought a domain and worked out DNS records; it worked. However, while at work, I saw some folks having conversations about self-hosting and static sites; cheaper than WordPress, more control, and the cachet of being a coder. Look at me, fiddling with things all by myself, like a proper technologist. It's always 1997 on the Internet anyway.
Right then, time to switch.
My colleagues were using GitHub pages, which I do actually rate as a concept because we use it in a hosting tutorial that I consult on - it's a great platform that's pretty dang versatile. The problem for me, was that I didn't want to lose all my content on WordPress, and at the time there wasn't a tutorial on importing from WordPress into Pages. I'm not a front end expert (by ANY stretch of the imagination) so I would not be a good candidate to start writing that shit either. So, is there an alternative?
There is! I found a platform that downloaded to a PC, synced with GitHub (and therefore pages), and could do the building of the static site when you needed it. That building essentially took place on your machine and then just committed it to the repo - all words I understood. The first flag was probably that this ended up being another 15 minutes on the Internet means 2 hours in real life job, except that including the DNS re-routing and one tea break, it ended up being 3. I finished it at 11pm, compiling the site and pointing it in the right place. Great - I'd learned a lot, saved myself some money, and could now also be a member of the static site hat club.
Later that week, I wrote an explanation of data architecture/hype terms on our work platform and decided that actually this would be a very decent blog post, so I wrote it using the platform. It was simple and straight forward to write, until five seconds after the publish button, I got an error code. A long, difficult one which was impervious to Google, and the platform was small enough so that this exact code had not yet come up on their forum. I followed some generic tutorials about failures to publish but to no avail. It thought it was published on the platform, but I couldn't actually see it on the site.
And that, reader, put me off writing for a year. I couldn't tolerate the failure of it, even though this was neither that serious nor significantly my fault. I only needed a small excuse, apparently, to divert myself away from something I view as my main hobby (writing), but also something that helps me develop (writing about the thought provoking parts of my work). Over time, a small speed bump becomes a wall, as per this Insta reel from TheNewHappyCo. (The fact that Instagram has an embed code and hasn't cooperated embedding it here is a good example of me learning about these platforms in real time.)
Time passes, and through another activity at work, I hear of another platform: Ghost. Looking over someone's shoulder this time instead of hear-saying, it looks pretty neat. But, when I looked first in March or so, it was still a bit too home brew for me to spend time trying to do all this again. But looking now in August, aha! There is a plan that will do all the hard work for me: perfect.
Sometimes our growth in our work actually comes from accepting our limitations and understanding why we do things; the point of my blogs is to write, not pretend to be a front-end developer, and I'm OK with paying someone to do that for me.
As long as they can import all my old content into this platform😅.
