A New Website

This website used to be a Ruby on Rails application running on Heroku.

When Heroku decided to get rid of their free plans for data hosting earlier this year, I reflected on whether I was actually using the features of their platform. I had a nagging feeling that I did not really need to pay $7.56 per month to host a full Rails application with a ~150 MB slug size for a website that did almost nothing except display a small amount of information that can be easily found elsewhere. The cost was small, but this is definitely a "waste not, want not" type of thing.

At most I was using it to either proxy messages between Slack and my Google Drive music folder (a time-consuming and error-prone process due to the sandboxing and restrictions necessary to make Google APIs work), or hack on getting new Rails updates to work. After a while it stopped being fun. So I decided to take it down and start over.

Now we are here. This is now a static HTML website generated with Eleventy. I use Tailwind CSS for the styling. It is hosted on Amazon S3, and I use a CloudFront Function to simulate the directory listing structure. Eleventy is fun to build with and surprisingly easy to learn.

I am not sure what I will make out of this website. It might turn into a full blog like I used to have, or it might rot. Who knows?