Same Dog; New Site

The blog has moved!

Which surely doesn’t seem like that means a whole lot since it’s been about 2 years since my last update, but it has changed none-the-less, and I felt that deserved an update!

This seemingly simple and innocent change was necessitated after the Squarespace purchase of Google Domains registrations prompted me to transfer the enki.dog registrar elsewhere. Given that the original blog of Enki the Dog was hosted on Blogger via Google’s own Domains’ integration, I expected that it would also be wise to port the site’s hosting as well. For both of these, I decided to use Cloudflare. The domain name transfer was easy, but I expect most platforms make that true. The advantage, however, of choosing Cloudflare over another provider was in their simple and limited cloud service offerings. You see, this blog isn’t exactly a complex system with any sort of service API or backing database. Instead, it’s just a static site serving up some static text with the especially important static images. Even the home page isn’t a thing that changes dynamically without my input. Because of this, using Cloudflare’s proxy + their r2 object storage seemed like the perfect option!

And perfect it was! I got the original idea from working with Amazon Web Services’ S3 back in the day, where they advertised using public S3 buckets as a perfect fit for serving static sites. Pre-2016, that would have worked fine for this purpose, but the problem with Amazon’s S3 offering today is that, on its own, Amazon S3 doesn’t provide HTTPS support, and HTTPS is mandatory to have a publicly functioning website on today’s internet. To add HTTPS support on top of S3, Amazon suggested to use their CloudFront product or to abandon S3 hosting to choose one of their other products entirely. Personally, I didn’t want any of that. My goal was for it to be mindlessly simple, so, while I didn’t really investigate it much more than that, I had started to become a bit turned off to the AWS experience, and that led me to investigate Cloudflare’s r2 service.

Now, with hosting and the domain name problems out of the way, the last question was how to make the blog itself. By this point, I had already investigated a few static site generators such as Ghost, Jekyll, and Hexo and decided that Markdown was a critical requirement for my workflow. After some trade offs between the different tools, I decided Hugo seemed like the best fit for now. That may not always be true, but I think the best thing about choosing a static site generator and a simple hosting option is that I can easily change the tooling, and then if I don’t like that, I can easily change back or to something different. Maybe that’ll happen or maybe it won’t. After all, it’ll probably be years before I post another update, and to be honst, preserving the old content that could have disappeared from blogger was far more important to me than ensuring I had a platform for spewing my thoughts out onto the web.

Enki

And now, I guess I’ll leave y’all with what y’all’re really here for…

Enki the Dog!

He’s still as good a boy as ever.