w/e 2022-08-28
Today we went out for breakfast because there’s a place that’s close enough to walk to! Imagine! It’s about 4½km (3 miles) away so normal people would drive but, still, amazing.
§ I continued to explore hosting options this week. I had high hopes for DigitalOcean’s App Platform, their equivalent of Heroku, but it turns out there’s no way of running repeating tasks: no cron and not even an equivalent to Heroku’s simple Scheduler. I usually need to run some repeating tasks but haven’t yet needed something as complex as Celery so App Platform isn’t an option.
I’ve spent a little while having a go with Render, another service like Heroku, which I like a lot so far. I particularly like their Blueprints, a way of specifying most of your stuff – web server, database, cron tasks, etc. – in a single text file. That would make it easier to destroy and re-create a set-up, or copy it for a similar project. It took me just over an hour to get a Django site up and running from the point of knowing nothing about how anything worked.
But… there’s always a but. Although you can set up cron tasks each one costs at least $1/month. Given my own site has eleven periodic tasks, pulling in tweets, photos, Last.fm data, etc, that’s a bunch of money for what seems like not very much utility.
It’s also a bit of a shame Render runs on AWS – I would like to avoid Amazon as much as possible. I don’t think Digital Ocean uses AWS, other than for Spaces, but I might be wrong.
I still keep changing my mind every few minutes between “use a spendy-but-easy service like Render for each site” and “grow up and use one VPS for them all”.
Heroku’s announcement this week of ending their free tiers of everything adds a little extra wrinkle to consider.
§ We finished season two of Ted Lasso Football Man this week. At first I found it strange how it was very unfunny, as if the writers had changed. Even bits that were obviously supposed to be funny fell entirely flat. Then there were many episodes where I was pretty bored – it felt a lot like they didn’t quite know what to do now the whole set-up is no longer new. I was thinking I probably wouldn’t watch any further seasons. But then I mostly enjoyed the final two episodes so I’ve finished it with a good memory. I still find Ted annoying and unfunny though. The best thing has been Nate’s journey – it’s not often you see a character change so much over the course of a season.
§ That’s all. If you’re going to Interesting (and you should), I’ll see you there.