Self-hosting again

Right back to it.

I managed to lose access to the older attempt at a site, skimming by with no domain on free hosting for static sites – which, was a way of publishing the first twine story I ever wrote. It might actually be lost media at this point; the source sure is, but I bet I could find the export. I’ll trawl the harddrives from moving and switching PCs later. Massive changes in hardware, to me, are considered as excuses to start afresh rather than ever port things over; something that bit me in the past with phones and photos and the giant stretch of pre-2022 that’s entirely vacant, only existing in broken hardware.

All this to say: this is a lot more robust. I didn’t know if I would be doing “the furry thing” five years from then; turns out, I still am, and I’m even more into it and going to physical events (gasp!) and writing and so on. No reason to treat it all as transient and something to cut loose at a moment’s notice when I’ve found such a nice thing in community and finding a home on the internet, so to speak.

Still a static site where the only JS is in service of light and dark mode. Tried to scrape by without any JS at all for a fun constraint, but I like having a color scheme toggle.

The general workflow is:

• folder of markdown files that contain metadata in the yaml header, editor agnostic but I’m currently using obsidian
• build script that:
  • aggregates all the markdown
  • sorts by date and builds the site sidebar and directory by categories
  • copies static files, like interactive games, into their own directory
  • spits out static html for each page according to template rules
• I just copy this directory to the server cloudflare workers free tier

and that’s it!

This took about three days to set up, mostly being one day to write the generator, another for some of the formatting and CSS corrections as I got frustrated, a good hour being mad at the light/dark mode toggles, and making a pipeline to quickly get stories added.

source for site generator

total price: just the cost of a *.gay .com domain, cloudflare didn’t have the gay domain