# rebrand: i renamed this site to iio.ie

this blog used to live at notech.ie but now it lives at iio.ie. this post explains my motivations behind this change.

# the name

6 years ago i bought notech.ie to get serious about blogging. i followed some bloggers, i wanted to be like them. i also wanted to run my own blog server just to show the world how it's done. so i wrote a very minimalistic server and served plaintext only posts. i was quite technophobic back then, and thought i will write about how to live without technology. so i named the site "no technology blog", notech in short.

but 3.5 years later i learned go. programming became fun again. i even rewrote this site to be more ordinary. and i was no longer blogging about technology avoidance. rather it became a place where i write sometimes very personal thoughts to sort things out for myself. the notech vibe was no longer fitting. i was also envying bloggers with short domains.

so the decision was made: i'll migrate to a new, short domain. i wrote a little script that queried the whois database for various letter variants of my liking to see what's available. then i've picked iio.ie since that's easy to type on both qwerty and norman layout (@/kbd). there's not much more to it than that. if i had been extra motivated, i'd have gone for a .ee tld for an even easier typing experience. but it required non-trivial bureaucracy so i didn't bother. so does .ie but i had that sorted out already for the previous domain so i didn't need to do anything for that other than reference my previous domain.

# the server

previously i ran the server at home. that worked flawlessly over the years. the only bit that annoyed me is that this way the internet, along with its army of bots, were constantly trying to hack it. i didn't really isolate the server from my home network so this was a bit worrysome for me.

on cloud i wouldn't care much about this. even if they would be able to hack the server, there's not much damage they could do there.

cloud would also provide much higher availability. if i ever move apartments again, i wouldn't need to worry too much my server not working in the meantime. nor would i need to re-create my weird setup for the server. nor would i need to worry whether my new isp is still giving me a static ipv4 address.

cloud would work for a while even after my death! i even have a plan to add a secret new post that gets revealed if i stop updating my blog for a longer period of time. i want to blog from the afterlife!

and nowadays cloud is pretty cheap. i found free solutions for all my needs using fly.io and cloudflare.com. they have quite easy apis. so thanks to these this blog lives now in the cloud for free.

i write about the technical aspects in @/cloud.

# lost features

i decided to drop one feature: gopher support. this site used to serve the posts in gopher format on port 70 too. i don't think that had any usage at all. to continue supporting that over ipv4, i'd need a static ipv4 address. that is also included in fly.io's free tier so i could totally support it.

but i want to be a nice internet citizen and not waste a whole precious ipv4 address on my silly blog so i went with a shared ipv4 address. tbf, i'm also glad dropping the gopher support. i'm creating a lot of html demos lately, gopher doesn't seem to be the right medium for this blog anyway.

i also no longer need to manage ssl certificates anymore myself. fly.io takes care of it. yay!

previously i had a smtp server implemented for @/msgauth. i replaced that with a cloudflare email worker so now i implement that with a simple http handler instead. things became much simpler, yay!

but other than the gopher thing, these changes should be completely transparent.

# no redirects

now that i have a new domain, what should happen with the old one? i don't want to keep renewing that. in case anyone looks at the old site, i want them to notice the migration and update their bookmarks. if i make the old domain transparently redirect to the new site then people won't notice until the domain is gone and then they won't know where the new domain is.

for this reason both the old rss and the old domain just print a message that the site was migrated and has no automated redirect.

# effort

i was worried this migration will take a long time to execute. but i only needed about 4 full, undisturbed days to figure out everything and finish the migration. most of the time was spent on debugging because i was trying to do dumb things. and i managed to squeeze in a few improvements to my server such as improved rss support and the etag header support. i was pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of everything.

i now try taking every fifth week as vacation to work on small projects like this. that's how i found the time for this. seems to be working perfectly.

tl;dr: the shorter domain name and the cloud migration is something i was thinking for a while now and now i'm happy that i finally managed to make the change.

published on 2023-09-07

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