✧✦Catherine✦✧
i think one of the more valuable things a technology can do is to not make its users suffer its authors' opinions
this isn't always possible (biases will inevitably be embedded!) but you can try to make it happen & that gives the authors more freedom
e.g.: grebedoc *just* publishes files. it doesn't care which static site generator you use, if any. it doesn't even care that much if you use git. if you can zip it, it works. my views on which SSGs are good do not come into it whatsoever
✧✦Catherine✦✧
for no clear reason github pages privileges Jekyll and that, among other things, puts Jekyll itself in a very odd place (also it embeds assumptions like "you're probably using *nix to develop the site" since that's where Ruby is most convenient)
Furbland's Very Backwards Account™
@whitequark what if i'm using Hyde /j
jcoglan
@whitequark the odd thing is that it's not even a lot of effort to use any other tool; I use mdbook for a bunch of things. but the workflow is very, uh, non obvious
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@jcoglan yep, it's just weird
jcoglan
@whitequark and then it's still slow as hell to serve pages even when you know it cannot possibly be generating them on the fly because it doesn't know about the build tool you used
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@jcoglan it surprised me how easy it was to serve pages faster than github
jcoglan
@whitequark right, just put nginx on any old commodity cloud server and you get instant page loads. all my own stuff is hosted like this. I'm only using github pages because it seemed slightly more convenient for publishing stuff about some work in progress but I'll probably move it
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@jcoglan not quite, this will still be slow in Australia (which is why i do anycast)
✧✦Catherine✦✧
im a similar manner, beyond a necessary-to-language-evolution contract, Amaranth does not care how you write your RTL. fifty Python programmers will come up with fifty different ways and i try to support most of them at least
anti-omakase *chuckle*
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@hugopeixoto it's too expensive (a /24 costs many hundreds of dollars per year) and the process makes it way too easy to dox me (which is an issue bc of the stalkers)
wiki
@whitequark I don't know much about anycast, but reading the rage4 page it seems like you are tunneling traffic through them. Is implementing anycast directly to your servers not feasible? (I saw a toot from you mentioning getting an ASN, maybe its related)
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@hugopeixoto if IPv6 was more popular i'd be doing it already
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@hugopeixoto if grebedoc gets popular enough that a /24 is a justifiable expense i'll do it
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@halfbyte I actually wasn't aware of this despite using Jekyll for my stuff!
it is definitely possible to host static HTML (add .nojekyll) but the fact that you need to know about it and remember it is a source of problems even for me, and i'm a certified computer toucher
half/byte
@whitequark Not sure if you care and I don't think it's still a valid reason at all anymore but Jekyll started out as "that thing that creates GitHub pages". I think it was possible to host static html as well relatively early or even from the start, though. GitHub was still *very* ruby centric at the time so it made some sense.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
also, related, a part of the reason why i do all infrastructure i maintain in a maximally open and reusable manner is that I want people who like my infra but don't like me for whatever reason to be able to just go "ok, fuck her, i'll run it myself" and do it easily enough
vendor lock-in can still happen in open source
Christoph Heiss
@whitequark This.
Another big reason for me personally is that if I (or e.g. the local hackerspace) has the possibility, aka. hardware and knowledge, to run it ourselves - so do it. And save the resources for others, who might not have the possibility, or just don't want, to host it themselves.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@c8h4 that's quite reasonable yeah! it's not the _primary_ thing it's meant for, but I put in quite a bit of effort into making git-pages (grebedoc backend) easy to run--there's a Docker container but it's also a single `go install` line, and it requires no configuration to bring up a basic, but fully functional install
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@dragonarchitect I have been actively working with Codeberg to do a migration from Pages v2 (the status quo) to git-pages (the backend of grebedoc) and in fact this was originally meant to be the primary use case for git-pages; however in practice even though it was deployed and you can use the new backend on Codeberg Pages today, Grebedoc is able to move more quickly on features / support / etc
Snaketember King Naga Calyo
@whitequark Question: Is grebedoc intended to also be a more actively maintained alternative to codeberg pages as well? Codeberg has kinda put their pages feature into maintenance mode with no intentions to develop its featureset further.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@dragonarchitect I will most likely add instructions for how to use Codeberg with Grebedoc at some later point soon since it is quite clear by now that both services can at least coexist and there is a lot of value in that; Grebedoc uses anycast, for example, so that page loads are fast anywhere in the world, and the deployments can be done from an archive
Christoph Heiss
@whitequark Making a project easy to run / setup is such underappreciated work, tbh. definitely had to deal with projects (often even though they provide OCI containers and anything) that were such a pain to setup up, although they shouldn't be.
Git-pages was a breeze to get running! I heavily appreciate a) sane defaults and b) not requiring 10 other external services just to get it up and running for testing.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@c8h4 thank you! :)
yeah, I'm no stranger to webdev and its usual trappings and "not requiring Redis/Postgres/etc" was 100% an explicit design goal from the start (and continues to be, I don't foresee ever changing this)
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@c8h4 is your deployment public?
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@hugopeixoto i guess i started the long bureaucratic chain that ends up with an ASN and an IPv6 PI allocation
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