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<h1 id="new-domain-and-code-forge">New Domain and Code Forge</h1>
<p>2024-01-29</p>
<p>As you can clearly see, my site&#8217;s domain has switched over to <strong>btxx.org</strong>. This post will go into details about the reason for this URL swap (spoilers: I&#8217;m a cheapskate) - but that isn&#8217;t all. I have moved my personal git repositories over to my own hosting. I will explain the reasoning for that switch as well.</p>
<p>But enough introductions, let&#8217;s get into it!</p>
<h2 id="bt.ht-is-no-more">bt.ht is No More</h2>
<p>I&#8217;ve abandoned <code>bt.ht</code>. Well, kind of. That domain doesn&#8217;t expire until 2025, which works out nicely since I can keep a complete web forward active for the entire year. This will avoid such a radical switch, similar to what I did years ago with my &#8220;uglyduck&#8221; domain<sup id="fnref1"><a href="#fn1" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>. Hopefully anyone who follows my dumb ramblings will have more than enough time to become familiar with the new URL.</p>
<p>For reference, those interested in updating their RSS will need to use the latest URLs: </p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://btxx.org/index.rss">RSS</a></li>
<li><a href="https://btxx.org/index.atom">Atom</a></li>
</ul>
<p>You have roughly a year to do so, since new posts should still automatically appear even with defaulting to the older URL (hooray for 301 redirects!).</p>
<p>There were two core reasons for switching domains. The first was based off a change in ownership with my previous domain registrar, Gandi. You can read more details <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777">here</a>, but they were essentially bought out, then decided to cancel their free email service and raised their prices. Not many registrars support the <code>.ht</code> TLD, so moving to another provider was already proving to be difficult. Once my mind was made up that I didn&#8217;t want to support such shady actions from a company, I thought even more about the concept of spending <em>so much</em> on a domain name in the first place. It was a novelty to have such a &#8220;short&#8221; domain, but that seems silly in hindsight.</p>
<p>Just take a look at the differences in domain costs and email services below:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>URL</th>
<th>Domain&#47;year</th>
<th>Email&#47;year</th>
<th>Total</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>bt.ht</td>
<td>$172</td>
<td>$60</td>
<td>$232</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>btxx.org</td>
<td>$17</td>
<td>$19</td>
<td>$36</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>By making this switch (for both my domain and email service) I would save a yearly total of <strong>$196 USD</strong>. This was a no-brainer. The minute I did the math I thought, &#8220;Hell, I&#8217;m already moving everything to a different registrar <em>and</em> I need to look for a separate email provider&#8230;why not just start fresh with a new, <em>cheaper</em> domain?&#8221;</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve done.</p>
<h2 id="my-own-code-forge">My Own Code Forge</h2>
<p>As some people in the open source community might already be aware, <a href="https://sourcehut.org">sourcehut</a> had a major outage a couple weeks back. It lasted a few days and all services were impacted. This meant that all publicly hosted websites, build processes and <code>git</code> repositories were unavailable. It was no fault of sourcehut of course, they were viciously attacked for no <em>real</em> reason. </p>
<p>But this outage did get me thinking about what it means to &#8220;control&#8221; my own code. I always liked the idea of hosting my own git projects but relied on third-party services since they were more convenient. The problem with entrusting anything, not just code storage, to third-party services is lack of oversight. You really have no idea what is happening behind the scenes. You don&#8217;t control your own backups. You don&#8217;t have the freedom to tweak UI or user flow of your project views (which I understand is certainly an edge-case).</p>
<p>These thoughts lead me to research some &#8220;self-hosted&#8221; code forge options. My main contenders were:</p>
<ul>
<li>GitWeb</li>
<li>cgit</li>
<li>Gitea</li>
</ul>
<p>I&#8217;ll save you the suspense: I went with cgit. Getting GitWeb configured properly was giving me a lot of issues and Gitea seemed overkill for my person needs. I host through NearlyFreeSpeech (running FreeBSD) and they had a decent tutorial for setting cgit up on their servers. I&#8217;ve updated my own wiki for those interested in doing something similar: <a href="/wiki/cgit">read the full step-by-step instructions for setting up cgit</a>.</p>
<p>I still need to go through most of the existing projects on sourcehut and update their READMEs and purge the contents. The last thing I want to do is have users confused about which repo is the &#8220;real&#8221; one.</p>
<p>Fore reference the my repos are now located here: <a href="https://git.btxx.org">git.btxx.org</a></p>
<p>(I plan to place this in the main navigation soon&#8230;)</p>
<h2 id="mirror-mirror-on-the-wall">Mirror, Mirror on the Wall&#8230;</h2>
<p>I&#8217;m aware that to have extra protection from &#8220;downtime&#8221; that I should also mirror my code on separate forges. I plan to do this sometime in the future, but this isn&#8217;t a major priority for me currently. When the time comes I&#8217;ll be sure to update my repos referring to the mirrors (whatever platform that is I choose).</p>
<h2 id="room-for-improvement">Room for Improvement</h2>
<p>My code forge is far from perfect. Mobile view is lacking, there is no dark mode support and things could be slightly more intuitive. But I love it. The beauty of hosting everything on my own is that I can improve these things myself. For now, I&#8217;m happy with the outcome!</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr/>
<ol>

<li id="fn1">
<p>Someone oddly picked up that domain and piggybacked off the back-links. They happen to also be a designer&#8230;Guess the naming was that cool? &#160;<a href="#fnref1" rev="footnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>

</ol>
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