Friday, 7 Jun 2024 at 01:06

As I got this listed.to service to work alright I figured I should connect a custom subdomain to it as well. As I have a bunch of domains for various things I had to put some thought in to it, but settled for https://notes.imakethingswork.com, as imakethingswork.com at least in theory is my current "main" blog.

On the main domain I am running a CMS of sorts - basically it is a PHP enabled templating system that can read markdown files. The beauty of it has been that I can update it from whatever internet connected device I have at hand, and that the site builds itself based on a combination of folders and markdown files. Neat.

Or so it was for a couple of years. Lately I have noticed that the base framework, Grav, isn't getting much updates...it is feeling a bit dated and the developer doing the updates is basically spending his time on other projects.

That in turn led me to look in to other solutions.

At first I figured I should try the Obsidian Publish functionality, if nothing else as I was already paying for it (early bird discount) and I wasn't really using it. Sadly I learnt that it was really difficult to connect a custom domain to it - it landed me in a loop where nothing loaded properly despite me following the instructions to the letter.

I then decided to try out one of the new javascript/node based CMS's on another of my domains - hellqui.st. That one is running a system called Astro. It basically spits out static files, and also handles markdown.

The downside with that is node and its million dependencies - I basically need to have the full publishing stack installed on the device I'm typing on. Not a huge problem as I normally sit by a computer, but it does limit my ability to publish posts when out and about and only have my iPad/iPhone at hand.

The setup of Astro was nice too, as I also wanted to try out hosting via Netlify. The setup means Netlify only publishes something if a certain Gitlab branch gets updated, which also means I can type my articles without publishing them, and when I am done I simply merge the branches in Git which then automatically publishes. Quite neat, though still not as flexible as my "old" main blog.

That is where I was when I did a check-up on Standard Notes, seeing as they have joined forces with Proton (which I am already using anyways) and I also remembered I have an account in Standard Notes but in the end, at the time, had opted to dig in deeper in to Obsidian.

So...here I am. Now, we still have some niggles to sort out here. We shall see if my custom domain, a sub-domain in my case, will properly bind itself to my listed.to account. Having followed all the instructions, again to the letter, and set up my A record in my DNS, I still got an email saying it wasn't set up correctly, but that I could test it to verify it was correctly set up when I tried the URL in my browser and received a "certificate not valid" notification...which is exactly what I had...so that should mean it indeed IS correctly set-up.

Ah well. It is time to give it some time I guess. :)