IAMT #7: chib.dev Post-mortem

and pointing "chibdev.substack.com" to "chib.dev"

What an absolute shitshow. ‘chib.dev’ is a domain I purchased back in ~2021 while the pandemic was in full-swing. It was a personal project that I was developing in conjunction with a school project; I intentionally made it such that both websites would use the same underlying infrastructure and frameworks, thinking I was killing two birds with one stone.

The school project was called Message in a Bottle, a web-app where people could anonymously send, receive, and reply to (what we hope would be) encouraging messages. How could that possibly go wrong? I believe the site is still up, albeit unused and likely broken somewhere.

The chib.dev site was going to be used for written entries, as well as a canvas for any random web app projects I would want to tackle. Perhaps a resume booster to show off other projects I’d done. Spoiler, I barely touched it after it went up. I frequently hoped I’d return to resurrect the site and make it all pretty, but alas, given the title of this post, we know where this is going.

I’m planning to make a CNAME record to point ‘chib.dev’ to ‘chibdev.substack.com’ so the site will no longer be reachable from that URL. Setting a custom domain has a one-time $50 cost with substack.

Other than the 1/20th of a band I just dropped on this substack, I’m generally a cheap bastard and proud of the fact that I kept the cost of running the site to ~$12/yr, the only cost being the domain name. This entry cost me $50 to write, more than it cost to run self-hosted chib.dev for 3 years (~$36).

I’ve always wanted to talk about the simple tech stack for the site, so I’ll do that here, at the new, inaugural home of chib.dev.

1. Domain Name

   1. Purchased from Google Domains in early 2021 for ~$12/yr

   2. Squarespace Domains bought Google Domains in June 2023 so now I pay them $12/yr

2. Github Pages

   1. Created a Github page that is hosting my site. In 2021, you could have one GH page for free from a private repo

   2. Looks like that’s changed to a paid feature and I can’t change any options for my GH page as long as I’m keeping it part of a private repository rip

3. Cloudflare

   1. Free tier allows for DNS records while using Cloudflare’s name servers

   2. This is what essentially points chib.dev → “GH page URL”

   3. SSL certificates also managed here

4. Vue.js

   1. The website is a static page made with the front-end javascript framework Vue 2 and the Vuetify 2 library. Vue 3 had a stable release when I started to build the site, but Vuetify 3 wasn’t out yet, so I stuck with Vue 2. Vue 2 is now in End Of Life(EOL) and no longer maintained

   2. The only interesting code I had written for the site was a dynamic blog generator. I would write a blog in Markdown, place it in a certain directory, and Vue would generate a blog post page and domain path upon building the static files

Below are some stats from Cloudflare (as of 9/1/24):

Thanks to those who’ve browsed the site before, thanks to @captainturnip for the art/styling, and thanks for reading.

And with that, chib.dev is closed

- chris

snapshot of the blog page; design by @captainturnip