American Monk Website Has A New Home
AmericanMonk.org has a new free home! I started the process last week and if you are a subscriber who gets this email, the task is 90% complete. There is still some refinement to do.
Why Move?
Originally, I was using a WordPress framework on a hosting company called NameCheap. While NameCheap sounds like a small company, they are one of the top ten names in hosting and DNS services (where you get a registered website name). My sister who started a cooking website called, CookingWithAlisa.com was so kind to host me for a few years on her own account. However, I started getting notification messages that my website was getting shut down, sometimes a few times per day. My sister’s website was fine and it was just my own site that was affected. NameCheap’s Tech Support claimed I was using too many resources and they were shutting me down. They told me that an address located on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) was causing extensive amounts of traffic. They helped me block them, but I was still getting shutdown messages. My website does get a lot of traffic. As I said before, I got nearly 60,000 real person web page views in 2023. That is quite a lot for a small website account, so I’m not sure what the real reason for going beyond my resource allocation was. Was it an attack or was my site too heavy or was my site getting too much natural traffic? I don’t know, but I needed to take action.
Where Is The American Monk Website Now?
It was known that my website was too heavy, so I decided to move away from WordPress and now use HUGO as a static website. A static website is a basic website that you might have seen in the late 90’s. Due to the simplicity, there are various servers which will host you for free if you store your code on Github. However, since Github also has free static web page services and they are a huge company now owned by Microsoft, I decided to go with Github as a single provider. Now the website is simple and the new web pages have a lighter feel. I’m quite happy with the move.
Is Hugo For Anyone?
Hugo and static websites are not for everyone. Although HUGO uses nearly the same MarkDown (MD) language as Wikipedia to create pages, making global changes can be quite technical. If you don’t know programming, it is not so flexible. However, I have made some friends over the years and ChatGPT+ is a huge friend. You should find that the new website is similar to the old website. Most of what you see is “out of the box” behavior.
What to do?
Try exploring the web pages and let me know what you think. The website is more “surfable” because the tags will give you related web pages. Try clicking on a tag and see what you get. I’ve added extra tags for you to look around. You can also go to the main list of posts.
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