blog.chobble.com

Nix Site Builder Updates

An update on my efforts to get everything in place to run a libre / ethical / transparent web development agency. I took it easy for a couple of weeks but I'm trying to ramp up the pace now.

I've spent a lot of time working on nixos-site-builder over the last few days. I'll use this alongside chobble-server for each Chobble-hosted site, where they will perform their duties:

As I've migrated sites over to this server (these ones) I've improved the site builder script to add features like:

Using NixOS for the setup / builds will (eventually) mean everything is documented in a useful way for other would-be hosters whether they use NixOS or not. I might also add build scripts for other setups - and test them in VMs in NixOS. It will also help me learn Nix - cool!

I also started using Bunny CDN on the Vegan Prestwich site. It's totally unneccessary there, but I'm doing it to get familiar with Bunny who seem like a great choice for a CDN host, which I'll need at some point. Turns out it was dead easy! You just set Bunny to mirror from an origin host (I chose the www-less version but will change this eventually) and then you set a CNAME DNS record to the *.b-cdn.net Bunny domain you'll see when you create a "Pull Zone".

You can't set CNAME records for your root domains which means if you want Bunny to cache the full site including HTML in the most optimal way you need to ideally host the site at www, and then you need to figure out the www-less to www redirect yourself somehow. I've set <link rel="canonical"> tags for now, but really should do a 301 redirect to the www instead. Soon!

Next up I'm thinking of installing Goatcounter, which I can set up to parse my Caddy logs to give me privacy-protecting lightweight analytics, which I'll need eventually so may as well figure out. Parsing the logs will give way less fidelity than running the Goatcounter Javascript, which itself will give way less than running some big corpo spyware like Google Analytics, but that suits me great.

I'm also taking tentative steps towards running my Ruby on Rails app on NixOS as a systemd service, and thinking about emails, versioning, and database backups - and how long I can go without dealing with them.

On the business side I've done a lot of thinking about how pricing should work. My goal is to be radically transparent - which means that I won't do any of the common tricks of the trade:

But I still need to earn a wage, so I need to figure out an hourly rate that lets me do that, and think of a way to provide attentive support and guidance that doesn't leave me working for free.

I'm currently thinking of charging about £200 per hour, and £100 for charities. Those feel like high numbers but I think that's probably what's neccessary to cover my costs for now.

And Support-wise I'm thinking something like, you can either:

Both options would be totally fine by me, but if I could get 100 customers paying £20 a month for support that'd be an awesome baseline income.

Anyway, that's enough for today. Over and out!