Alright, I finally need to get off my rear and move some of my stuff to self hosted.
This is, for lack of a blog right now, something faintly resembling a worklog on the project.
One of the main tricks here is that most of my communications services, including this, rely on my domain DNS to work, so… if something goes haywire, let me know. But I’ve been having some weird issues with register.com DNS lately (and I’m actually planning to migrate off register.com at some point for registration, they’re just too damned expensive and awfully “BUY ALL THE UPSELLS EVERY CLICK” sort of annoying).
So, I’m moving things to Cloudflare DNS, starting with some other domains I can experiment on. Register.com doesn’t support exporting (of course), so I get the joy of manually transferring a ton of domain records over. Wheee!
I’ve never had an issue with Namecheap.com trying to upsell much. Of course, I just use the basic DNS included, nothing fancy needed for me. More than happy with them as a registrar/basic DNS, although I imagine Cloudflare does DNS great too. And probably offers the distributed/redundant/etc for basically free given their infrastructure setup, I imagine.
Nothing like that. There’s a small offer for a locking service but it’s in the same option list and font as any of their extended-value options, and not a click-through promotion, nor have I been bugged about it so far. If I were I’d probably switch.
When I’m managing my DNS entries, it’s been a while, there might be some mention on the top or bottom bar or something of Premium DNS. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just when I login or look to buy a domain.
Anyway, no real force pushing/click-through of any kind of upgrade during regular DNS management for Namecheap.com.
Well, I’m happy to call the DNS transitions successful, they seem to have worked just fine.
Unfortunately, experimenting with things, the concept of an automatic transition from Blogger to self-hosted blog is just missing a lot of the pieces. I can get a lot of the work done, but if I want to maintain URLs with redirects, self host images, and (importantly) do something sane with image scaling to prevent loading full size images constantly, there’s just a lot of manual work to do. I could copy the pages over easily enough, and keep images on the Google image hosting, but… why? They’ll just break that at some point in the future too, knowing Google these days. So I have to pull down the full size images (not the thumbnails), have them rendered locally and resized… plenty of steps to follow.
However, there exists some sane html to markdown converters that can, more or less, chew on the Blogger output. So I think I’ve got a flow to use.
I still haven’t worked out comments, but if I’m touching each post, I suppose I can copy useful comments into a section at the bottom, and then use Discourse for further discussion. May dark-theme the forum, though, to match.
Has anyone messed with self hosted analytics? I wouldn’t mind some basic analytics of page views/where people are coming from, but I’d rather avoid Google Analytics at this point.
Yeah, I thought about that… but the Google Cloud Storage logs are fronted by Cloudflare. However, looking into it, Cloudflare has analytics.
They’re included “for free” with the paid plans (starting at $20/mo… which I’d rather not). But, they’ve got a free tier for analytics with a Javascript snippet - that is still, far as I can tell, cookie free. I think.
Discourse has been sending email EHLOs with localhost or localhost.localdomain, and Google’s SMTP relay finally said, “No, you’re not going to do that anymore.” It terminates the connection if you do that now, starting… a few days ago, I suppose.
Now to figure out how to get the Discourse devs to fix it.
