💾 Archived View for gem.hellfirehost.uk.eu.org › gemlog › 2024-02-15.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:43:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Gemlog: Weren't You DCE?

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Note: This article is about ~hellfire103's website, opposed to this capsule.

Anyone seeing this blog during February 2024 will be one of three kinds of people. Either:

You're somebody I'm excitedly showing this website to
You work for one of the universities I've applied to recently
You read my post on my other blog or Mastodon, and you're coming to see what's up
If you fall under the last category, then this blog post is for you. So, let's answer the first question...

So... a new website?

Long story short, I wanted something that's easier to maintain. Neocities is great and all, but formatting paragraphs into individual "windows" and keeping the ATOM feed updated was a bit of a hassle, especially because I was using the web editor - and on a phone, no less!

I also feel that, while I am seriously proud of the look and feel I've managed to create, it's also required a liberal amount of digital duct tape in order to get the site to work properly on the sheer variety of operating systems, web browsers, and screen sizes around. A site like this, meanwhile, renders just fine in anything that supports TLS/1.1 and HTTP/2 or higher. The only two browsers that have failed out of the ones I've tested were Dillo and the browser on my Nintendo 3DS.

What will happen to the Neocities blog?

It will stay up. Do not think for a second that I would abandon something I've spent so much time on!

I would say that you may, at most, see a decrease in activity; but I hardly post on there anyway, so you probably won't notice much. I will also continue to post my art and various fun articles on there when and if I make them.

What about Gemini?

My Gemini capsule is a different matter. I plan to abandon it. I feel that a Gemini capsule or Gopher hole should focus on my tech and programming content; not my personal stuff. The personal articles usually posted to Flounder will now go to Neocities.

However, I do not plan to abandon the small web altogether! I will continue to use Station and Bubble, and I may decide to create a mirror of this blog using tilde.pink; although this blog should be accessible in Gemini clients through the use of the Stargate Proxy, so I might not bother.

Hellfire Host? What's that?

So, long story.

In the summer of 2023, I tried to set up a FreedomBox using my Raspberry Pi. It worked, but I wanted a way to access it remotely, so I went to register a domain.

I tried a few places, including NameCheap and Freenom (which was and still is unusable), where I decided to go for something along the lines of hellfire.[TLD]. Eventually, I came across EU.ORG which has apparently been giving away free .eu.org domains since 1996. I applied and waited... and waited... and waited... and then forgot that I had applied and promptly turned the FreedomBox back into a media centre.

Flash forward to February 2024, and I have decided to create a new blog. I need a domain, so where do I go? Back to EU.ORG. And what's waiting for me when I get there? My shiny new domain that took around seven months to be delivered. Hey, at least it's free, right? I assume that the domains are being assigned manually, and that the people doing it have lives outside of their computer, which is fair enough. I applied for the domain edanosborne.eu.org, which is neater; but decided to make do with hellfirehost.uk.eu.org in the time being, in case my preferred domain doesn't get approved until next Xmas.

How did you do this?

Well, this site can be divided into three parts:

The domain
The DNS
The static site
As I explained before, the domain was acquired through the good people over at EU.ORG. It was tricky to do and took a long time, but I'm more than happy with the result.

The DNS will cause some controversy. I used ("oh, the horror!") Cloudflare to get it off the ground. I understand that this company does not get along with the privacy community, but their service is easier to use than FreeDNS, so I'll stick with it for now. If anyone has any major concerns, either use someone else's services or send me a message. My Matrix address is linked in the footer.

The static pages are served by Codeberg Pages. It's really quite simple: just create a repo or branch named pages, add a few HTML files, and you have a website. I initially looked into static site generators, but it actually seems easier just to write this by hand.

What now?

Well, I'm first going to finish setting up the site, and then look into ways I can improve and automate it. After that, I'll just write an article every so often and the rest will be history...

First Published 2024-02-15 23:23 GMT

Last Edited 2024-02-18 01:13 GMT