Yet another Taijee site
If you know anything about me beyond my obsession with changing my alias, you also know that I'm changing my personal site almost as often. It could be that I get bored and want something to work on to occupy myself, or that the one I already had was rushed, botched, and abandoned, ready for me to try to make a return only to find that it all might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics might have been better, even, because at least then the code would be pretty to look at.
Why I decided to start again... again
In truth, no one reason really drove me to make this site. Having ADHD, I find I often stumble into (and invariably out of) projects in a, for lack of a better term, state of fugue. This week, that just so happened to be a new site.
Again.
This time, though, I've set myself one goal -- this is the last
personal site
I will ever start from scratch. If I have to type the whole
<!DOCTYPE html>
routine one more time, I fear I might have a conniption.
Yeah, right. How is this going to be any different?
I'm trying something very very new with this site.
Through a nice fella I came across during my switch from Discord to Stoat (post about that soon), I learned of a little “expression language” (as they term it) called Origami.
In short, it's a distilled-down version of JavaScript, specifically geared towards quickly and efficiently defining the structure and content of a site. Super duper useful for blogs -- I can just word-vom directly into a Markdown file, sprinkle in some metadata, and Origami will create a page for it, formatted and styled exactly the way I want it to be, complete with a header and footer to integrate it perfectly into everything else.
It's a black box to my widdle amateur brain, but it essentially makes the whole website-structure thing so much easier. I found it quite intuitive to use (after some head-to-desk contact), and soon found myself inspired to put it to use -- maybe this will be the thing to take some of the mental load off of using plain ass HTML/JS, and inspire me to, I don't know, finish what I start?
The villain: hosting
Up until this point I've been using GitHub Pages to host my personal sites. It works great, but it gets to a point where I want a little more control. Not only that, I'm trying to wean myself off of GitHub because, let's be honest, Microslop are a bunch of bumbling clowns.
Now, I don't have tons of money, so hosting was going to be an obstacle. If you don't know, a website has to be constantly hosted on a computer, so that when someone visits the site and sends a request, there's something on the other end receiving that request and sending the site's content back. Without that, the browser doesn't know what to display, so it throws its hands up into the air and goes "iunno".
And machines, as it turns out, aren't free to run. As a result, hosting services and VPSs involve my worst nightmare: monthly subscriptions. I do not exaggerate -- I would rather drive a toothpick under my toenail and kick a concrete wall than fork out any more money for a subscription than I absolutely need to.
Free tiers for these VPS services do exist, but they either limit your uptime or make it so the site has to "wake up" every time someone goes to visit it. I know I'm not particularly responsive or reliable, but that doesn't mean my site can get away with it too.
The hero: a Pi Zero
After a gruelling thirty-nine-or-so seconds of brainstorming... lo and behold, on my desk, to my left, laid the solution: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that I had been gifted last Christmas. I'd been looking for the perfect use case for it, and at that moment, I was pretty damn sure I had found it.
Now, is a dinky computer with 512 megabytes of memory and a single gigahertz processor going to be able to handle the same kind of usage as the data centre of a reputable VPS provider? Fuuuuck no. But it doesn't need to. For my use case, for someone as uninteresting as me, it does the job more than well enough.
Reliability
I know that the reliability of a Pi Zero isn't going to be stellar, and that it would only take someone with a vendetta against me and too much time on their hands to cause problems. That's something I'm going to have to work on, and, to a degree, kind of just deal with for the time being. For now, while I don't have much attention on me, it'll do the trick: and until then, this should be a pretty solid foundation as both a personal void to ramble into and a long-term project to work on and keep myself busy with.