Moved to Cloudflare Pages

Another blog post about changes to the blog. Read on if you are interested in how I moved on from Blogger to CloudFlare Pages.

Blogger was one of the earliest platforms that allowed for a Sass deployment of a blog in 2007 when this blog started. In the years followed, Google made major changes to it, and at some point, customizing it became a real PITA. Also, the Internet has moved on to an SSL-mostly world, in which having a custom domain does not work well when it’s aliased. Given I had not been motivated to write sometime after 2009, I decided to just leave it as-is.

A few years ago, when I discovered that it was possible to host using Heroku by shimming a small Rust proxy, I started a separate blog writing about day-to-day trivialities, just to keep me engaged and to figure out how well this will work.

To date, some things don’t work very well, especially when this setup is really a kludge:

• The generated Hugo artifacts had to be checked in along with the source
• Build time was incredibly long, as a trigger to recompile the binary occurs each time I publish a post
• Heroku wants me to pay to use an SSL certificate for a custom domain
• Heroku pauses the site during a period of quiescence, and is slow to resume

My only requirement is that I do not want to pay for a hobbyist blog. Hence, even with these drawbacks, I hung on to it.

Recently, I read about CloudFlare Pages from Hacker News, and thought I should give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy CloudFlare had made the process for my new blog, that I thought I should port this. Having CloudFlare manage my DNS has also been surprisingly painless that I was impressed. Now I get to have free hosting and TLS/SSL certificate management, which is a great bonus.

There are some caveats though, because of blogger’s permalink naming scheme, I wasn’t able to fully make them backwards-compatible. Some images aren’t backported either, but they shouldn’t be consequential given I don’t use them much.

But if there’s ever a need, the old site is always permanently available at https://vincent-liu.blogspot.com.