This Blog has migrated from Blogger to self-hosted Gatsby

Over the past couple of weeks I migrated this blog from Blogger/Blogspot to a self-hosted site built with Gatsby.

I’ll share some technical details over on janaka.dev later.

I’m planning to move content on topics related to my day job over to janaka.dev. This will be dedicated any other topics I might choose to write about. Though a called a blog some content will be in notes form.

Why did I decide to use Blogger in the first place?

I launched this blog around 2007. I had web presence since ~1996. I started this while I was at university and it was hosted on uni web servers. Then when broadband (ADSL) became available in London ~2001 I started hosted it at home, on a desktop PC turn web server.

At some point I decided I was bored self-hosting and saw it as more hassle than fun. Probably coincided with me starting to run a proper web hosting stack at work. I decided I just wanted to write than tinker with the tech.

The likes of AWS wasn’t around yet. Blogger was one of the first hosted blogging platforms. So that’s why I chose it.

Since then I’ve moved this blog to a Medium like content platform called Glipho. It was a good friends start up. That did work out for them and I moved my content back to Blogger.

I skipped the whole Medium thing. Mainly because I want to have a presence on my own domain (vanity).

Why did I decide to move away from Blogger?

Blogger hasn’t improved or evolved much in the last decade. Google really hadn’t invested. With this there’s little worry in the back of my mind that they’ll shutdown the service.

Web technology has come a long way in the past decade+. Frameworks like React, Static Site Generators like Gatsby, and cloud infrastructure didn’t exist back then. I can utilise commercial grade infrastructure to host a high performant website very cheaply.

I wanted to experiment with the distributed web. Back in 2016, at the Fullstack Fest conference I first learnt about IPFS. I like idea of web content being available for ever. A blog seemed like a good use case.

I wanted to get hands-on with a few technologies relevant to my day job. I’ve not shipped anything to production in my job for over 5 years now. The backend stack and infrastructure hasn’t changed that much. I can still keep up enough by reading. But the front end stack has. Plus I done way less front end so don’t have as much of a foundation. So re-doing my blog using Gatsby and hosting it on the D-web sounded like a good combo. I started that journey with janaka.dev last summer.

bought janaka.dev. Google announced .dev TLD and I had to grab it before it went (vanity?). Well told myself I wanted to do something like this to justify the purchase.

I’ve missed doing a little coding.

A pandemic happened! Which meant I had some extra time on my hands.

If you are wondering, the root domain for this site isn’t hosted on the d-web yet. Redirects aren’t supported on IPFS gateways, which I need for the migrated content. When Google has re-indexed the new canonical URLs I’ll look into switching fully. In the meant time I might run a mirror on https://ipfs.janaka.co.uk. I already do this for janaka.dev.