So, I moved my blog and wrote my own blogging application from scratch using vanilla javascript, html, css.
I want to write about why I made the switch.
I initially used blogger, a google owned platform. It's free. You can use a custom domain (although you cannot use https with your custom domain). You can monotize your blog with google ad-sense (built in) and it has analytics to see which posts people are viewing, where they are on the globe (roughly), and from which sites they are being directed from (if you want to target your audience better and get more money).
I don't write my blog for money, I don't want to track my users, and I don't want google to either.
I have a few reasons why I have a blog (definitely not because I'm popular). I write because it is one way I can be a part of the tech community online. I write because blogs are good places to put things that are to long for a tweet or a comment. I write because I like it as a way to connect with other techy's.
Anything I post here is free to all for any one to learn from and I don't want to be paid for it from ads. I have a day job.
During the past year I've become more concerned with digital privacy and have been slowly degoogling my life. I degoogled my phone over the summer, I've been transitioning to a new mail service / cloud storage (which works pretty well actually), and I've installed browser extensions to protect my privacy online (such as Privacy Badger written by the EFF)
After I installed privacy badger I noticed how common place it is for privacy badger to block things. On my old blog, it would list 4 "potential" trackers when I visited it, all from google of course. I figure I don't like the thought of being tracked for advertising and so I don't want anyone who comes to my blog to be tracked either.
I'd been toying with the idea of changing to something else and/or self hosting for quite some time before I came across neocities.org. A website bringing back the glory days of ugly websites for personal use, complete with guestbooks and the like! The nostalgia factor is already strong with this one. The free tier is actually pretty good, but I opted for the "supporter" tier. The down side is that you can't host a backend. I'm having fun getting to manage my own website my way. At some point I'll have all the features I want in a blog, but I currently have all the ones I need. I'll post more about the technical details later.
I am having a blast! It's been so fun to write everything from scratch in vanilla tools and using vanilla tool chains. No typescript (which although is sweet, it's not vanilla sweet), no bulky frameworks (like angularjs or angular... current version), and no supporting browsers I don't care to support (namely IE 11 or lower).
I want'd to write this for greater control over my blog, more experience writing vanilla javascript, and so I could deliberately not support internet explorer. (did I mention I don't like internet explorer? or supporting it?). By day I am a web developer that uses AngularJS, Angular, dotnet, core, typescript, ... blah blah blah, list of tools that I don't care about that much. So I wanted to write things my way somewhere. and that's here.
I feel it has turned out really well so far, the site is fast, light, and performant. It's only external dependencies are bootstrap (only the css file) and a browser that supports ECMA script 6 or higher. It even has a semblance of SPA like routing. I'm planning on writing a more complete post about the project later. Hopefully when I'm ready to release it as either a framework or a an application (open source, of course... though if your really curious, you can open your dev tools now and start looking at what it is so far)
The fun, the ideals, and the control I have over my new site is like a breath of fresh air! I hope I can enhance it to a point that I can seperate out the code and hand it out.