Introducing SudoVanilla.org
4/23/2024
New website! New logo! New domain! New stuff!
Greetings to everyone! A lot of changes have occurred over the last month, and this post will cover everything I can about the changes. Let us begin!
New Website
Obviously, the website design has been updated and some of the source code behind the scenes has been refactored. As usual, the entire website is open source, here’s a link to it.
New Logo
The new logo isn’t that much different from the old one. It’s still a ring with a letter “V” using the Windsong font.
What’s different is that the font weight was increased and the border width of the ring has also been increased, hopefully making the logo more viewable when it’s smaller on screen. No promises, I’m not an expert on logo design.
New Domain and Changes
One of the main explanations for why I opted to change the domain is to finally abandon Cloudflare. While I could simply transfer the existing domain, I already owned sudovanilla.org through the Porkbun domain registrar. It was cheaper to do it this way since transferring domains is costly.
Wait, why ditch Cloudflare? There have been certain instances where I’ve been recommended to get SudoVanilla off of Cloudflare.
For one instance, the 4Get developer did not want to add SudoVanilla’s 4Get instance since the domain used Cloudflare, for user privacy purposes it was denied. Weather or not if the DNS was proxied, that part didn’t matter, the 4Get developer wanted it off of Cloudflare at all cost.
Another instance is that Cloudflare does log IPs with their built-in analytics panel, which I’m disappointed that I can’t disable to increase privacy for everyone who goes to my website. A goal of SudoVanilla is to have a no log policy, Cloudflare did not help this case.
Others changes will be that you can’t take old sudovanilla.com URLs and simply flip com to org, as some services will be getting their URL changed.
As an example, SudoVanilla Code has always been served at “/code/” as a pathname. With the new domain I’ve changed this to “ark.sudovanilla.org”, also renaming it to SudoVanilla Ark. There was a major reason behind that decision, that’ll be explained more later for SudoVanilla Code.
New Documentation Under-the-Hood
The documentation may not look that different from what it was already, but it’s all different under the hood, as I’m dropping Astro Starlight integration from the website source code.
This is because I usually like to tailor services to SudoVanilla’s website design and such, so I’m always making sure that when I override components in Starlight, they work and look consistent with the entire website.
Also, a CMS has finally been integrated to the website…locally that is.
Keystatic CMS
The Keystatic CMS has been added to the website’s source code, this can be used when running the website locally. This makes creating contributions to the docs and Init Privacy much more easier and faster.
This also offers two-way editing, meaning when you edit an article or post, you can do so from either updating it from Keystatic CMS or by editing the .mdx file.
Learn more about Keystatic: https://keystatic.com/
SudoVanilla Code Ark
The heart of SudoVanilla, is where all it’s source code lives at, which also makes this a very important area. The name is being changed, as already shown in the heading, from SudoVanilla Code to SudoVanilla Ark.
Choosing this name just seems a little more original than “Code” or “Git”.
That also means the URLs are changing for this:
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sudovanilla.com/code/ > ark.sudovanilla.org
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hub.sudovanilla.com > ark.sudovanilla.org
Another major change is that I’ve reset the entire instance! If you had an account on SudoVanilla Code, it has been removed, along with mine own.
This means all SSH keys are gone too, yikes! My bad.
One of the other main reasons to change to a subdomain, is to allow users including myself to upload Docker Images directly to the website. It is not possible to do this if your Forgejo instance is running on a pathname. That was the original reason for SudoVanilla Hub(quietly launched in October 2023), which is now merging into SudoVanilla Ark.
Also, the UI has been optimized and modified to be tailored with SudoVanilla’s website. If there is an issue, which there may be some honestly(I’m not perfect), let me know by emailing me or mentioning me on Mastodon.
The changes made to the UI will be open source.
View now: https://ark.sudovanilla.org/
UI changes: https://ark.sudovanilla.org/Korbs/sudovanilla-ark/
Discontinuing MinPluto
Was in it’s beta stage, but now axed! The MinPluto project has been discontinued, repositories will be archived. While the project was decent, I don’t have the time and effort to continue development mainly due to the lack of funding that SudoVanilla gets.
Another main reason is to also continue my contributions to the already existing YouTube frontend known as Poke, formerly PokeTube. Poke has been gaining a lot of popularity lately and I’ve been seeing a lot of great improvements to the project.
Fun fact: MinPluto originally began as a Poke fork then turned into a full spin-off of Poke with it’s own code using Astro over Express.
If you were, by any chance, using the MinPluto project, I recommend switching over to Poke.
Try out Poke as your new YouTube frontend: https://poketube.fun/
Switching Email Service
Since the start of 2021, SudoVanilla has used Fastmail as it’s preferred email service and SMTP solution, the experience has been great with no issues. Sadly, due to the lack of funding that SudoVanilla has, I can no longer afford to keep paying for Fastmail monthly, so I plan to close my Fastmail account and set out to switch to another service that’s cheaper.
With the transition to sudovanilla.org, which is registered with Porkbun, I’ve decided that I’m going with Porkbun Email Hosting.
By switching to Porkbun, I’ll be saving $36 yearly, as Porkbun Email Hosting is only $24/year.
As for a SMTP solution, SudoVanilla has actually switched to Resend a few month back and it has been working as intended to send out emails from the sudovanilla.com. If you have ever gotten an email from “no-reply@sudovanilla.com”, this was sent out with Resend.
Learn more about Porkbun Email Hosting: https://porkbun.com/products/email
Funding Needed
Hey, I need funding! SudoVanilla has no income. Consider donating.
Thoughts on the Future
When this was called “Korbs Studio”, people assumed this was a group that runs the website, yet it’s just one person, then the name change 9 years later to “SudoVanilla” in 2023.
I’m Korbs and SudoVanilla is my developer name, although there have been thoughts about converting all of this into a group of open source developers and I would lead it. If I were to go into to this vision of a group, I can already think of a few people who would join. This would need a lot thought before proceeding, but if you are interested in seeing this kind of thing, let me know what you think and if you are interested in joining.
As for if there’ll be any new projects in the works later on, I may have some ideas in-mind.
There are some thoughts on building more projects that Netweak related, like building a widget/component library in Astro that uses Netweak API/JSON response.
Besides this, I’ll want to continue working one existing projects first, before working on new ones.
More News To Come
There are some other major things going on that are not yet announced, these will be posted at some point in the future in their own post.
Stay tune!