Hosting solutions

At the time of writing, I host all my projects on Github Pages. This is nice for stability and ease of use, but doesn't let me do dynamic pages. Since SvelteKit supports dynamic websites as well and GHP can't distinguish between the static and dynamic part I also have to do a weird prerender thing to get it to work on GHP, which works fairly well but is annoying to set up.

I'm planning to run my own home server at some point in the near future, which would let me host dynamic websites without outsourcing to other companies like Netlify or Vercel. Once I do, I'll probably also move this website there in order to get rid of the prerendering step.

Typescript weirdness

Many of my "smaller", more focused projects are made in simple, static HTML. I like not having a folder full of build files, and as long as I only need one page for the app static HTML is the easiest solution in my opinion. But I still want to use typescript rather than javascript, so what I've ended up doing is have an esbuild job in VSCode watching my .ts files and rebuilding the javascript side every time I save. This also has the effect of pushing all the generated code into a single file, and I could get it to minify it as well if I wanted. It's a little yucky; it duplicates all the code since I have both JS and TS, and the job has to be configured differently in different IDEs. But it works well enough for me.

This is also currently my preferred way to write mockups and prototypes, rather than python or some other language. I used to use Unity/C# for this, but the overhead was annoying and the ease of writing Typescript has won me over. It also lets me host any projects online if I feel like it without having to rewrite everything.

Domain

My domain is registered at Oderland, a registrar based in Gothemburg. They also do hosting, SMTP and various other web services, but I only use the domain part of their business.

I thought for a bit about whether I wanted a .se or .com domain, but eventually I landed on .se. There were a few reasons for that, but mainly I chose it because the organization that manages these is nicer than the .com one. They also have a maximum price for the domain, so while the "rent" on a .com domain could theoretically rise arbitrarily high [note] , .se-domains have more bureaucratic protections.