Word Aligned, hosted by Github

2014-03-13 • , • Comments

To anyone who subscribes to this site’s feed, my apologies if your reader recently got filled with items you’d already seen. I can explain.

About seven years ago, I signed up for a great deal on hosting for life with a company called TextDrive. For most of the time since then, this service was actually provided by Joyent — who took over TextDrive. Then they, Joyent, said the hosting for life deal was being “sunsetted”, i.e. canned. Happily TextDrive’s original founder, Dean Allen, stepped in to revive his company and honour the original offer, which has indeed happened, though it’s been all too clear that he’s been hard to get hold of whilst the operations staff have been over-stretched.

Last week, a tweet from one of these hardworking ops tipped me off that TextDrive would soon be gone.

Tomorrow!

What to do?

After some googling I’ve chosen Github pages as the new host for Word Aligned. I’ve had to relinquish a little control over URLs to make the site truly static. (A side-effect being old content appearing with new identifiers in the RSS feed). I also won’t be configuring a web server or rooting around in rotating log files. The experts at Github can take care of that.

I do get to keep my own domain, which was paramount. I don’t have to pay anything, which is nice.

Previously, I used version control to track my site’s contents and rsync over SSH to publish. Now I simply use version control: pushing a change to github is publication.

It’s early days yet, but I’m happy with the change. The feed should settle down now, so stay subscribed. Please let me know if you spot any problems with the site.