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Notes From Building Coderberry
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Synopsis

Notes on building this blog.

Description

This website is where I play around with ultra-low-cost web hosting and this article is where I track my thoughts.

The current iteration of coderberry.com is built on

Hosting

Development

Stuff that didn't work

Web Components Suck (Kinda)

  • I tried plain Web Components for the terminal
  • fiddly, clunky, tedious, verbose, and poorly documented
    • State management is worse than old react classes.
    • No real jsx/whatever HTML templates.
    • Complex, feature-poor CSS integration.
    • etc. It's no good.
  • Basically unusable without a framework/library.
  • Maybe in another 10 years...

Google Workspaces For Email

  • Technically worked.
  • Seriously is it dead though?
    • Setup instructions are misleading and broken.
    • Outdated styling.
    • Clunky sign up process. ( No matter what option you click, or what resources you request, you are forced to buy a $26 package, then downgrade it )
  • Are you OK, google workspaces?

Stuff that did work

Chromebook as a Dev Environment

  • $200 for a usable, free Linux Dev environment

Minimal Cloud Deploy/Integration

  • The last iteration of this website used codebuilder pipelines/cdk and some API gateway.
  • The AWS serverless deploy/run/iterate cycle sucks.
    • update CDK
    • push code.
    • wait for build/package
    • wait for deploy
    • deploy fails because of cdk type/weird dependency issue.
    • It is now 30 minutes later.
  • minimal dependencies/static hosting are awesome.
    • develop/iterate test on chromebook
    • Upload to s3.
    • Success.

Plain CSS is Pretty Good

  • I used to use semantic UI with react.
    • Lots of infrastructure
    • Usual deprecation/migration/etc. pain of external projects
    • Bland result.
  • CSS is pretty consistent and feature rich by itself now.

Static Instead of Hosted Search

  • I played around a bit with AWS opensearch
    • Mixed CDK support for configuration.
    • complicated setup for "I Want to search my small site"
    • complicated client-side configuration
  • Pagefind
    • all local,static.
    • 1 minute to configure (max)
    • easy to integrate.

Stuff that's... fine

11ty Static Generator

  • Replaced next.js from prior site.
  • Easy to setup. No complex build.
  • Lots of documentation.
  • Active community.
  • Weirdly inflexible.
  • Weirdly opaque (visibility/traceability)
    • What was the final data that generated the site?
    • Where did that data come from?

esbuild Transpiler

  • I know I said no transpilers. Used to transpile es6 from search/typescript output into ES5.
  • Same fiddly unsupported/half-supported, weird error message nonsense as the last x iterations of transpiler tools.

Plain Old Javascript

  • Low dependency development is fun.
  • But React/JSX/webpack solve a lot of issues.

See Also

Author

Written by Michael Smit

Copyright

©2024 Michael Smit