hey friends! This site used to be at sedatesnail.blogspot.com. but now it’s here!

there’s still a little migration to be done, but I think it’s ready enough to go. please update your links (especially if you use RSS; https://www.dantasse.com/sedatesnail/index.xml should work but gosh who knows) and let me know if you have any issues!

why?

• on blogger, this page takes 24 requests! for a couple hundred kb! that’s dumb for mostly text. new page: 2 requests for 11kb, and one of those is for the favicon. not that you’ll probably notice the difference, but aesthetically this pains me.
• similarly, I have to compose this in google’s rich text editor, which insists on putting everything inside

  tags unless I really fight it. new one: markdown files which become very simple html, just as tim berners-lee intended. again, aesthetics.

• control my own site more etc. yeah it’s hosted on netlify now but even if netlify tanks I can at least port it out somewhere a little more easily. (google is proud that you can get your own data from them, and you can and it’s great, but this job of porting it definitely took me in the mid tens of hours.)
• oh yeah, speaking of goog, now they track you a little bit less. again again, aesthetics.
• google will probably kill blogger at some point. they’re certainly not doing much to maintain it.

this was a medium-large pain. most of the pain was:

• learning jekyll, then realizing it took 10 minutes (!) to build the site and therefore is completely unusable, then learning hugo. yeah yeah, I know hugo is “fast”, but I thought we were talking like 1 sec vs 5 sec here; nope, it’s sub-1-sec vs 10 minutes. I guess my blog is big? (1100 posts) … it’s not that big!
• parsing google’s xml. again, they give you your data, but it’s in a big xml mess, and I had to find and then endlessly configure someone’s script to turn that into markdown files.
• learning hugo. I think I like it okay, but there’s a pretty large amount of magic that happens, like magic filenames and you have to know where it’s looking for everything. ugh.

more migration details may follow!