A Growing Movement of Web-savvy Geeks Who Say Go Static (Simple Web Pages) and Move to Gemini Protocol
THE previous article ended by saying that we had reduced our computational load (as a Web site) by about 100 times about a year ago. Not even exaggerating! Moving away from PHP and bloatware meant that our hosting bills could be kept under control and downtimes (due to "moving parts" falling out of place, e.g. MySQL) became very rare, typically caused by something like a router reboot (to apply security patches at the edgepoints).
An associate has said that self-hosting (non-Microsoft specifically) can always be revisited, as it is generally an important point to drive home (bearing repetition, too).
Seeing that Ruben Schade had a post about Gravatar (which had gone rogue), the time to revisit this subject seems right. Schade is about my age and his Web adventures started at a similar age (we also correspond a bit), so he can remember better times - the times when sites contained all their objects (no HotLinking) and were relatively simple to build and manage. No "Ajax" (the buzzword has evolved a lot over the past 20 years). Also, apropos the importance of self-hosting everything feasible, our associate pointed to this new article from Jeff Huang. Like Schade, he has seen better days and yearns back to them, as he's able to compare "modern" to "old", then enumerate the advantages of the "old" ways. To quote Huang:
The problem is multi-faceted. First, content takes effort to maintain. The content may need updating to remain relevant, and will eventually have to be rehosted. A lot of content, what used to be the vast majority of content, was put up by individuals. But individuals (maybe you?) lose interest, so one day maybe you just don't want to deal with migrating a website to a new hosting provider.Second, a growing set of libraries and frameworks are making the web more sophisticated but also more complex. First came jquery, then bootstrap, npm, angular, grunt, webpack, and more. If you are a web developer who is keeping up with the latest, then that's not a problem.
But if not, maybe you are an embedded systems programmer or startup CTO or enterprise Java developer or chemistry PhD student, sure you could probably figure out how to set up some web server and toolchain, but will you keep this up year after year, decade after decade? Probably not, and when the next year when you encounter a package dependency problem or figure out how to regenerate your html files, you might just throw your hands up and zip up the files to deal with "later". Even simple technology stacks like static site generators (e.g., Jekyll) require a workflow and will stop working at some point. You fall into npm dependency hell, and forget the command to package a release. And having a website with multiple html pages is complex; how would you know how each page links to each other? index.html.old, Copy of about.html, index.html (1), nav.html?
This is related to self-hosting, our associate opined, but only kind of. Currently, the system that manages this site (it's Free software, AGPLv3 and in Git) boils down to few files, not highly complex databases with configurations inside the schema. We strongly encourage other sites to follow the same footsteps. Some realised it when it was too late. slated.org went offline a few hours ago (after nearly two decades). To quote: "So, on the 11th of August 2024, the domain slated.org will cease to exist, although (and this may be the most meta thing I've ever done) you may still be able to find at least some of it archived over on the Wayback Machine and archive.is. [...] To access this, and all other Gemini capsules, I recommend the Lagrange Gemini client. I will probably recreate all the articles from slated.org as Gemini pages on hazensparkle.co.uk, for posterity, at some point, maybe."
And prior to that the webmaster (Keith) said: "So I moved to a new hosting provider, that offers dirt cheap VPS, with a new (and also dirt cheap) domain name, and will be running a Gemini capsule (a "Small Web" alternative to http). This is a protocol that uses simple markdown, and does not use databases or scripting at all, so requires basically zero maintenance. This is what I wish I'd done right from the beginning."
Gemini is still growing*. Not the Google "Gemini", the alternative to the Google-dominated Web. █
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* Unlike a "modern" Web site, a Gemini capsule won't demand that you renew a certificate every 6 or 12 months (or every 3 months, for 'free'). You can add a certificate with expiry set to one decade later. As of tonight, to quote Lupa, "2548 (90.0 %) capsules are self-signed, 61 (2.2 %) use the Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt, 222 (7.8 %) are signed by another CA (may be not a trusted one)." Let's Encrypt has now fallen to just 61. It used to be hundreds. Self-signing is the way to go.