#dev 2025-10-29
2025-10-29 UTC
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# 
jeremycherfas once per month?
# jeremycherfas Coming here on the suggestion of [aciccarello] to canvas opinions on a host for my proposed static photo portfolio site. I'm planning to build with Hugo and have looked at Github Pages, Cloudflare Pages and, now, Netlify. Netlify does look like a good option on the free tier. I am wondering whether I can stay in the free tier. I do not understand what 1 production build per month means. Does it mean I can update the site only
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# 
null_biodun Hey everyone 👋
# IWDiscord <null_biodun>
# null_biodun Some of my published work:
# null_biodun I’m Abiodun, a Fullstack and Mobile Engineer with over 5 years of experience building scalable products end-to-end. I work across React Native, Node.js, NestJS, and React, delivering high-quality apps with real-time chat, notifications, and live updates.
# IWDiscord <null_biodun>
# null_biodun • GYWDE – https://apps.apple.com/ng/app/gywde/id6602887701
# null_biodun • Banana Crystal – https://apps.apple.com/ng/app/banana-crystal/id6449340769
# null_biodun • Sorteet – https://apps.apple.com/ng/app/sorteet/id6740534713
# null_biodun • Eko Hotels Delivery – https://apkcombo.com/eko-hotels-delivery/com.ekohotelsdelivery.customer/
# null_biodun • Fundoo App – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fundooapp&hl=en
# null_biodun • Additional Work Samples – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xxlrGyPAl_U7TummmQKwbDAZ9bU2E94v?usp=sharing
# IWDiscord <null_biodun>
# jeremycherfas That's nice. Do you have a personal website?
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[Murray] [jeremycherfas] Netlify is still a really nice host, but they're definitely going through the "we need to recoup some of the VC investment" phase. I hadn't even seen the new credit-based plans (I've apparently been grandfathered into the old system), but from what I can tell, you get 300 credits per month? So that would mean 20 builds, max, assuming you aren't doing anything else with the credits as well (server functions etc.)
# [Murray] They've always had a build minute maximum, so when you run out the site stays up, but you can't release it again. If you aren't planning on using any of the other credit-based features (which I'd imagine you aren't, for a static photo site), a release every-other day would seem fine to me. I used to worry about it, but in the 5 years I've used Netlify I've never once come close to that limit (it's always been about the same, not quite
# [Murray] If you run out of credits, they will pull your site down until you either buy more or the next month clocks over. Not sure if this is still the case, but I've run foul of them yoinking _all of my sites_ hosted on their service when one exceeds its limits. Looking at the credit wording, that seems to be the same
# jeremycherfas Thanks [Murray]++
# jeremycherfas Very helpful to have your perspective. I guess that building the site in Hugo means that if I do fall foul of bandwidth, I can move it somewhere that is either cheaper or free. From what I've read, Cloudflare is a good option for that.
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# [Al_Abut] Hey [jeremycherfas] and [Murray], fellow Netlify user here that’s obsessed with photos. This is right up my alley and I realize now that I’ve been waiting to wax lyrical about exactly this topic, so I’ll turn this into a more in-depth blog post for others at some point soon.
# [Al_Abut] In the meantime, here’s my boiled down recommendation: cannot recommend Netlify highly enough for hosting static files, yet I avoid it all costs for images or other media.
# [Al_Abut] just builds my site whenever I push up changes via GitHub. Easy peasy.
# [Al_Abut] That’s my approach to staying well within the free tier and never worrying about build minutes, bandwidth, credits, or the other limiters while taking advantage of their super smooth integrations with not just github (github pages worked great for me for over a decade with my manually hand coded site) but also their integrations with various popular frameworks. I’ve been on Astro for two years and am about to transition to Eleventy, Net
# [Al_Abut] The one thing I foresaw as their hook to get me to eventually upgrade was that my images would run afoul of the storage limits, which is negligible in my case for static text files. I only need a few build minutes per month whenever I push changes because I don’t have a dynamic site that’s constantly building with every visitor.
# [Al_Abut] So I keep all of my images and videos on S3. It costs me like 33 cents a month. I consider this to be the minor tax of a “just paid enough” tier that I know the free tier will always keep my site up, even if it gets temporarily popular from something like hitting the HN front page.
# [Al_Abut] Technically you could use github pages for this too, which I did for a solid decade, and their free CDN is so performant that it always came out as ahead of even paid options like Netlify or Cloudfront. The problem is that their storage limits are completely opaque and don’t have a hard cap that they specify with a service agreement, or at least not one I could find publicly, so I was always nervous that they could turn off a site at thei
# [Al_Abut] I went long - hope that helps! Curious to know what you go with.
# [Al_Abut] own discretion at any time and moved my stuff to S3 because of it.
# [Al_Abut] Also, about the Netlify credits - they’re not really targeting our use case for small personal sites. If you read their blog post announcing it, it’s part of the industry-wide shift to charge for hyperactive ai developers. So if you’re not hunting for free tokens for generative stuff, you’re not part of the tsunami that they’re trying to ride.
# jeremycherfas Thanks [Al_Abut]++
# jeremycherfas To be clear, you're saying to host the images on S3 but the site on Netlify?
# jeremycherfas I already have buckets on S3 for other purposes, so that would not be super difficult for me.
# [Al_Abut] Haha, I broke loqi
# [Al_Abut] Try moderating that, our friendly little chatbot
# [Al_Abut] Yeah, sorry, there probably should be a content limit and friendly nudge to blog it out
# jeremycherfas Part of my sudden burst of activity is that I would like to get something set up with redirects to photos.jeremycherfas.net propagated before I get to Berlin. But I probably won't succeed.
# [Al_Abut] Yes [jeremycherfas], I host my static files on Netlify and media on S3/Cloudfront. Works pretty well for me but would love fresh perspective on it because I’ve been doing it for years without really hearing about others doing the same. I never knew if it was that unique a setup or because it’s so “duh” simple that others do it too without thinking about explaining it publicly.
# jeremycherfas Got it!
# [Al_Abut] Yeah, I feel you on that too. My Eleventy migration is on hold until after because of family holiday stuff. In fact I’ll be on the road in LA during Berlin and will be lucky if I can tune in.
# jeremycherfas I hope you can.
# [Al_Abut] Hey, I wouldn’t have my blog back up at all if it wasn’t for the first IWC in SD two years ago
# jeremycherfas And of. course I have been moaning about the delay in receiving my data from Instagram when of course the notice that I have 4 days to get it arrived 7 days ago and prompty ended up in automatic Spam. Trying again, having made an exception for the sending email.
# 
[tantek] ^ may also be worth a tip on /Instagram#Export
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# jeremycherfas Wow, that was extremely quick. Full zipped download of 1.6 GB ready and downloaded.
# [Al_Abut] Yeah, it’s pretty impressive. That’s the official way to “sync” your photos to another service like Pixelfed.
# [Al_Abut] More like seed it with your archive before you fork, in reality
# jeremycherfas I chose high quality, and the square jpegs are 1407 x 1407 pixels, which is fine.
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# [social] Oh, Instragram export is a really good idea. Not that I’m moving off, but just to have it. It is central to quite a few IFTTT automations for me.
# [social] Interesting. I’ve been using Sunlit a bit. It needs some edge smoothing, but it is decent.
# [social] With posting photos, for me, part is the photo and part is the community I’m puting that photo into and the conversation (in words or photos that transpires). Flickr was incredibly good with the photo sharing and interactions that followed (all of that is still there and works really well, but the people wandered off looking for the dopamine hit of the new).
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[aciccarello] jeremycherfas I have 300 build credits (credit = minute?) per month and I've never come close to using that. My 11ty site builds in just a couple minutes and I post less than 50 times a month.
# [aciccarello] I have lots of photos but haven't yet done any build-time image optimization. If image optimization slows your build down, look into caching that part of the build. It's not heavily advertised but you can cache a specific folder between builds which should help.
# [tantek] hey indieweb devs, in case you also sometimes put Looooooooong URLs in your notes and are annoyed when they don't automatically wrap (e.g. at the "/"s in URLs) in some browsers (ahem, Webkit, especially mobile/iOS), the answer is this bit of CSS: line-break:loose cc: aaronpk for Meetable e.g. https://events.indieweb.org/2025/11/-indiewebcamp-berlin-oNMvxRpOvfEs
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# [Al_Abut] Ooo, I didn’t know that
# [Al_Abut] And yes, the idea of hidden charges is one very big horrifying drawback to my S3 strategy
# [tantek] you could even put the img src resources behind your own subdomain like img. http://example.com and then redirect those to the Flickr img permalinks
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# [Al_Abut] I keep meaning to see if I can solve it with a monitoring script or something but yes, the ideal would be an unlimited CDN with set tiers.
# [tantek] and if for some reason you want to migrate your photo CDN serving, you "just" change the img. http://example.com routing
# [Al_Abut] This is a really clever idea. Is this what you do now or know someone that does?
# 
Loqi A subdomain typically refers to a domain with one more "name(dot)" component than that which someone actually has registered which is often seen indieweb sites with a family name domain like joel(dot)franusic(dot)com, or on silos like matt(dot)wordpress(dot)com, or sometimes for hosting files elsewhere like images.yourdomain https://indieweb.org/subdomain
# [Al_Abut] Oh I meant using Flickr as a cdn
# [Al_Abut] Subdomains for media is cool too
# [Al_Abut] Very curious to see how it goes for you. I think maybe my responsive images technique might break it, but then again I seem to remember Flickr having native options for size variants…?
# [tantek] when I was "fully" using Flickr I had a whole very ordered and planned routine for how and when I uploaded photos, in temporal order, tagged them, etc. and I got behind a few times and eventually never caught up so fell off uploading to Flickr altogether, except as an occasional mobile private backup
# [Al_Abut] Same for me!
# [Al_Abut] Nice. Yeah it might be time to give Flickr another look.
# [Al_Abut] Flickr as headless CDN/CMS for media
# [Al_Abut] Comes with a few other benefits like automatic RSS feeds
# [Al_Abut] So then I can skip their crufty UI and still be supporting their business without serving up ads to my own visitors.
# [tantek] Mostly I keep supporting it because (1) it's < $100/year, (2) it's owned (again) by a small business owner (SmugMug) who is also a photo enthusiast, (3) there's a lot of Internet/Web2 history that is seemingly ONLY captured in Flickr's archives (including many now friends-only or "protected" photos) that I would like to see preserved so I see my annual fee partly as a donation towards that
# [Al_Abut] Yeah I’m liking this idea the more I think about it
# [tantek] maybe I should write that up in /Flickr#Why
# [Al_Abut] Also I love that the web is now old enough that we can have “what’s old is new again” trends like in other more established mediums, like fixing up old cars
# [Al_Abut] That’s how I used to feel about Vimeo
# [Al_Abut] There was an excellent paid level
# [Al_Abut] I just only recently switched away my embedded videos on my work portfolio after their acquisition
# [Al_Abut] Oh no way, that sucks. I didn’t know that they had that kind of behavior
# [Al_Abut] It was such a nice little gathering spot for the indie filmmaker crowd.
# [Al_Abut] I was a proud paid supporter of several filmmakers there, like Gary Hustwit of Helvetica fame and Kirby Ferguson from Everything is a Remix.
# [Al_Abut] On top of my own paid plan
# 
[schmarty] Vimeo had paid hosting, so it's possible that conferences etc stopped paying and the videos went away
# [Al_Abut] Ah, makes sense
# [Al_Abut] Because their limits were pretty tight but it was worth it for some of the features.
# [Al_Abut] Some things that became standard, like HD, and others that never did, like a nice classy solid color title and end screens without engagement cruft
# [Al_Abut] I’d be happy to pay for Flickr
# [Al_Abut] One thing I’d love to test out on your photos if you set this up is how performant it is
# [Al_Abut] That’s the other thing that keeps me hooked on aws - cloud ront is super speedy
# [Al_Abut] *cloudfront
# [Al_Abut] Although cloud ront sounds like a great band name
# [Al_Abut] Ah
# [Al_Abut] I’m disappointed I still haven’t heard back from the viewbug folks
# [Al_Abut] Still plenty of time until iwcsd though
# [social] Flickr as a CDN works well. That is what I’ve done for years.
# [social] I used SlideShare for presentations, but with Scribed owning it I need to replace everything and put all the presentations somewhere, but not sorted out the how nor where yet.
# 
[artlung] > _Always include a link back to Flickr when embedding or sharing images externally. This is required by Flickr’s https://www.flickr.com/help/terms._
# [social] Flickr used to have a good tight photo embedding option that linked back with straight up HTML to copy and paste.
# [social] The Flickr share option on photos is still there and has more options.
# [Al_Abut] Oh that’s a good find [artlung] because yeah, that’s a dealbreaker for me.
# [Al_Abut] Oh well, still fun to think about
# jeremycherfas Using Flickr as a CDN in the way you're all talking about would mean hosting ALL my photos there, which I don't really want to do. I want to be more selective about what is where.
# jeremycherfas Cross purposes. By all my photos, I mean all the photos I wish other people to be able to see via my website.
# jeremycherfas Phew.
# steven_96942 took a break from historic preservation site to work on my own.
# [tantek] the other advantage (for us IndieWeb folks) is that Bridgy has bidirectional Flickr support. Bridgy can publish your photo posts to Flickr (but that would be odd if you're already using Flickr as a CDN, which comes first etc.) and Bridgy can also backfeed likes, comments etc. on Flickr back to your website
# jeremycherfas Good point too.
# [tantek] wanted to connect that back to your prior point [jeremycherfas] that you made about some folks having the reaction of "if I can't like it then what's the point" https://chat.indieweb.org/2025-10-29#t1761730636248300
# [tantek] by POSSEing/backfeeding photo post to Flickr, it becomes possible to put "webactions" buttons (like, reply) on your photo posts which redirect people to liking/replying on Flickr (which requires a free account sure), without having to implement random people being able to "like" something on your own site
# [jeremycherfas] That then raises the additional question of webmentions on a static site. Solved, I know, and also more to do.
# [jeremycherfas] Determined not to let the best be the enemy of the good. This time.
# [Al_Abut] Exciting stuff brewing for Berlin
# [tantek] uh, Chrome claims to support it https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/line-break#browser_compatibility
# [Murray] [tantek] I've looked into using Flickr for hosting images in the past. It might be a viable route, though it's obviously a lot more expensive than an S3 bucket _seems_ to be. The thing that gives me pause is that the T&Cs are not entirely clear, so I'd be worried about paying money up front only to have it ripped away if they ever "catch" you
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# [Al_Abut] [capjamesg] very cool! Definitely going to do a write up and just happy people are thinking about it.
# [jeremycherfas] Alas, the memento-mori tool for reconstructing an IG account failed on my first attempt, saying that the HTML download was not a proper IG archive. Have asked for a JSON export to try that. Tomorrow.
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# [snarfed] re Flickr, I know it has a lot of fondness and goodwill in this community due to its history, which is well deserved...but note of caution if you actually want to build with it, its API has seemed pretty stagnant and unmaintained for a while, and it also has a few strange developer-hostile (or at least problematic) features like not serving the `Content-Length` header on its images (!):
# Loqi [preview] [snarfed] thanks for filing! specifically, the problem here is publishing to twitter. twitter has a [5MB limit on images](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/media/upload-media/uploading-media/media-best-practices#image-specs), so bridgy checks the source im...
# [tantek] ok https://tantek.com/undohtml.css is updated with line-break
# [snarfed] you're going to switch http://tantek.com's image hosting to Flickr?
# Loqi Photo upload is the act of creating a post whose primary content is a photo, typically captured by a camera on the same device that is creating the post https://indieweb.org/photo_hosting
# [tantek] [Al_Abut] you asked if anyone was doing the subdomain URL approach for photo CDN wrapping, I did find that it is on my to do list for my hosting code/project: https://indieweb.org/Falcon#own_photo_src_URLs (and was added on 2017-12-26 14:21:43 so it's been a goal for a while)
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# [Al_Abut] I think it’s really smart, so I might experiment with it too even if I don’t switch away from AWS at the moment. The idea that I can keep the exact same URLs and quietly switch the redirects with the near-mythical single line of code appeals to me deeply
# rgbivvv [tantek]: do you have rss on your site?
# Loqi RSS is an acronym for a set of XML feed file format variants used for syndicating time-stamped content from web sites like blogs and podcasts, and sometimes a shorthand for feed file formats as a whole including Atom, or even more broadly for the concept of feeds or syndication in general https://indieweb.org/RSS
# rgbivvv [tantek]: like do you have an rss feed that i can subscribe to
# [tantek] no rss feed but yes an Atom feed that presumably your software or service can subscribe to. linked from my home page per feed discovery standards so you should be able to enter my domain "http://tantek.com" into any feed subscription tool and it should automatically find it. if it doesn't, then it's an opportunity to file a bug and I'm happy to help with that
# Loqi Plumbing in the context of the IndieWeb, refers to all the underlying code, backend setup, protocols, formats that is all merely there to support the design and user experience of a site, the actual user visible and interactive parts https://indieweb.org/plumbing
# [aciccarello] Or if your feed reader doesn't do it automatically you can use a tool like https://www.rsslookup.com/
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# rgbivvv [tantek]: thanks!
# rgbivvv I'll add it to my reader :)
# [aciccarello] rgbivvv what reader do you use by the way?
# rgbivvv on my linux desktop, i use newsflash. i'm still looking for a good one for iOS. i was using feeed for a little bit but i didn't like ti that much
# rgbivvv [aciccarello]: ^
# Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "newsflash" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "newsflash is ____", a sentence describing the term)
# rgbivvv what does that bot do?
# Loqi Loqi is a friendly and useful bot, digital assistant present in the IndieWeb discussion channels https://indieweb.org/loqi
# rgbivvv does it write the pages?
# rgbivvv https://apps.gnome.org/NewsFlash/ here is a link for newsflash
# rgbivvv it's an app for the GNOME desktop environment
# rgbivvv ah i see
# rgbivvv is that why the wiki has so many pages :D
# [aciccarello] Looks like a nice app. I don't see anything about adding via a website URL though. Seems like GitLab is the issue tracker for the project. https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk/-/issues
# rgbivvv oh i thought a URL was the only way to add a website
# rgbivvv that's what i've always done
# [aciccarello] Maybe it does find the rel="alternate" https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk/-/issues/719#note_2429515426
# rgbivvv what static site generators does everyone use? i recently started making my own :)
# Kolev I use Zola.
# rgbivvv Kolev: cool, i'll have to check it out
# rgbivvv [tantek]: haha good, i'm glad to hear that
# [tantek] re: making your own SSG, check the bottom right corner of the cartoon here: https://indieweb.org/content_management_system#To_CMS_or_not_to_CMS? (no this is not a personal attack, it is very impersonal as it applies to many of us 😂 )
# Kolev Databases suck.
# rgbivvv [tantek]: hahaha very true
# rgbivvv right now it's definitely in its beginning stages but i really like it
# rgbivvv i'm glad i did it
# rgbivvv i can get exactly the features and the workflow that i want
# rgbivvv https://github.com/rgbivvv/slogger
# rgbivvv Don't judge too hard, software is not my forte.
# [tantek] Substack << Departure: 2025-10-29 https://edinburghminute.substack.com/p/a-new-home-for-the-edinburgh-minute
# Loqi ok, I added "Departure: 2025-10-29 https://edinburghminute.substack.com/p/a-new-home-for-the-edinburgh-minute" to the "See Also" section of /Substack https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=105478&oldid=103168