As I pen this diary entry, my site only exists in a text editor. I mean, if you gussy VS Code up, you could call this thing a "code editor" that lingers around the Integrated Development Environment store on weekends.

But, it feels like I have just a box of text docs...YEARS and YEARS of text docs! We could go back to 1989 on my XT clone running DOS 4 and we could read these words. We would have to store all uncompressed 2.8 MB of this site on both sides of EIGHT 5.25" floppy diskettes. I'm assuming my 11-year-old self had access to the typical 360 KB ones instead of the 1.2 MB.

And whala, I just moved my domain registration from NearlyFreeSpeech (NFS) to the massively superior Cloudflare. The thing is a BEAST! I would have left everything alone, but NFS has made a departure from being apolitical—hey, I prefer their old snarky IT voice, as if my web host was Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy. They have been that way for a good long time, at least since I signed up with them some 7 years ago.

Transferring my domain to Cloudflare didn't cost me anything beyond renewing my domain for an additional year; it's now expiring in April 2026. They even provide free privacy of your contact info from DNS lookups, something I used to plop $3 down each year.

Domain registration is one thing. What about the core purpose, NFS's role as my web host?

This is where moving to Jekyll/markdown years ago plays a significant role! Cloudflare Pages provides a FREE option. As listed here under the Pages side heading:

• 1 build at a time
• 500 builds per month
• Integrated web analytics
• Unlimited free admin seats
• Unlimited sites
• Unlimited requests
• Unlimited bandwidth

Going live wasn't too challenging: I have to use a third-party Git site to host my markdown. In figuring out its deployment, I had to run down two issues: one, it didn't autodetect my usage of Jekyll so I had to specify; and two, it failed on my gem file of...

gem "jekyll", "~> 4.2.1"

...whereas it rendered when I updated it with...

gem "jekyll", "~> 4.3.0"

ChatGPT proved to be invaluable as a companion in all this. Especially with awkward NFS documentation that is an astounding 427 muddied words in length! All of it could be remedied with a screenshot and MAYBE 5 bullet points. If the writer wants to meander, he ought to make a blog on Cloudflare.

To put it into perspective, this post is 440 words at this point.

Another good channel on AccuRadio: Top 40: April 23, 1985 Radio's top hits when you had your first (and maybe last) sip of "New Coke."