The History of the Blog
2006. Peterlink
It all started roughly at the institute about fifteen years ago. That was the dial-up era; there were no Facebooks or VKontaktes. I made a page at the dial-up provider (Peterlink, I think) to post lab assignments and things like that for classmates.
Now I can no longer find any traces of it, neither in backups nor in the web archive.
LiveJournal
Then I tried keeping a blog on LiveJournal. I disliked it immediately: you could not lay out some arbitrary page.
2008. Masterhost
I bought virtual hosting from Peterhost, but disliked it strongly and stopped using it.
Then everything moved to Masterhost and existed for quite a long time on the domain stas.raskumandrin.ru and their virtual hosting.
2010. Mojolicious
I rewrote the blog on Mojolicious.
2016. Digital Ocean + AWS S3
At some point I moved from Russian hosting to the European Digital Ocean. The price-quality ratio was many times more attractive than domestic analogues.
Mojolicious was no longer running on shared hosting, but on a virtual server.
I uploaded the images to AWS S3 storage.
2019. GitHub Pages + AWS S3
The move to GitHub Pages happened for several reasons. First, it is free. Second, because of the fuss around fake-news laws, a .ru domain could be blocked over some note about Navalny. GitHub is unlikely to be blocked. Third, the domain has to be renewed and monitored; with GitHub this problem does not exist.The downside is perhaps only that the blog now has a less pretty address.
And the dynamic parts were lost too: several pages had backend work, for example the weather page that collected radar images from different sites.
2022. Turning the Blog Off and Back On
After sixteen months with the blog turned off, I finally turned it back on.
2024. Cloudflare Pages + Cloudflare R2
Unlike GitHub, Cloudflare Pages has broader possibilities for hosting web pages in terms of license-allowed content.
Cloudflare R2, with its free limits, turns out to be more cost-effective than AWS S3 was.
The move from GitHub and S3 took a total of several hours; Cloudflare has import tools that work very well.
Comments
Posts need comments. While this was a static site on shared hosting, there were no comments.
Then, during the Mojolicious period, comments were stored in a MySQL database.
After moving to Jekyll there was again a period without comments. At different times I tried Disqus and Telegram comments.
Now, in 2024, I have settled on comments built through integration with GitHub Discussions: https://giscus.app.
And every time I moved from platform to platform, the old comments were lost 🤡 — generally speaking, there were not many comments; I moved some directly into blog posts.