Washing-Up Software Projects
It's been no secret for a long time that Amazon is a grossly unethical company but I'm as guilty as anyone for letting convenience guide my shopping instead of my conscience. Like many, Jeff Bezos choosing to kiss the ring of Donald Trump was the last straw for me, and I've set about something that I should have done years ago, by de-Amazoning my life as best as I can, cancelling Prime, refusing to order from them, and curtailing any grocery shopping I might have done at Whole Foods. (We don't have any Alexa devices, thankfully, though having another evil megacorporation listening in on us is probably just as bad and a discussion for another time.)
But a lot of people probably don't realize just how deeply entangled that company is into their everyday lives. At the time of writing, Amazon Web Services - their cloud hosting platform - accounts for about 30% of the total worldwide cloud infrastructure market share, with Microsoft's Azure lagging behind at about 21%. It's estimated that something like 74% of Amazon's total profits come from AWS.
Amazon's core business isn't about selling you crap and delivering it next day. That's just a fun little sideline. It's running the websites and services that you probably interact with multiple times a day, silently and invisibly.
There ain't a lot that any of us can do about that. If your banking app or favourite social network is running on AWS you'd probably never know it. But developers with any say in the matter can at least try to support alternative options.
One advantage of AWS is that it's relatively cheap, at least for small projects. I've used AWS a lot in my day job, so when I was setting up this site, determined that I neither wanted nor needed a heavy CMS like Wordpress and was happy with it being static HTML, I decided to throw it into an S3 bucket (Amazon's cloud-based file storage), point the domain at it, and bam, job's a good-un. It wound up costing me about seven bucks a month, which seemed reasonable at the time especially compared to some other hosts I had used in the past.
Anyway, even paying those seven bucks leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and after seeking recommendations on Mastodon I've moved this site over to Porkbun. It was fairly quick and easy and, even better, only costs about $30 for the whole year.
(This is not necessarily an endorsement of their service btw. I've only been a customer for a few days. It's been smooth sailing so far, but other options are available, do your own research, etc etc.)
Did I mention that I added the ability to upload to S3 to my SuperSimpleSiteGenerator? Well I don't know if I'll rip it out as a matter of principal or if anyone else would find it useful. I suppose it'll break eventually as a result of an API change and I won't have the desire to fix it. Anyway I'll probably be adding FTP support soon. Maybe you'd like to use it yourself, if you want a quick and lightweight way to spit out blog posts with little-to-no server-side shenanigans required. Alternatively here's a nice list of options curated by Alan W Smith.
My tiny little #site generator now supports writing posts in markdown! That's nice isn't it?
I've also thrown the code up on Bitbucket in case anyone else finds it useful, but like I said, it is extremely simple, has precisely zero test cases, and is the product of just a couple of hours work. I'll add to it though, it's kinda fun.
So with the flaws of centralized social media making themselves crystal clear, owning ones own content and means of publication is becoming appealing once again, just like it was in the old days of blogs, where everyone had their own website and linked to each other, rather than everytyhing being siloed in just three or four megasites.
Another positive about the "old" web, was that web pages were relatively lightweight things made of html, css, maybe a handful of images. If Javascript was involved it was kept to a minimum, updating a visitor counter or enabling a comment section. Nowadays even sites that seem relatively simple to the naked eye might be downloading megabytes of framework dependencies that even the developers can't keep track of.
To that end I thought I'd have a go at setting up some kind of blog here, on space that I personally own and pay for, and try to keep it as simple as possible. I hacked together a simple static site generator in C# in a couple of hours. It takes plain text files and does some very basic string replacement to inject them into html files and gets them ready to upload. If my host goes down or I forget to pay the bill or they turn out to be nazis or something, the whole site still lives on my local machine and can be moved wherever.
I should probably add RSS feed generation, and I'm thinking of having it pull in posts from other feeds such as my itch.io page, Mastodon account, and maybe my old Twitter archive that I downloaded before nuking my account, but we'll see.
