Migrating to Vercel

Losing the old blog#

My old blog was hosted on Google Sites, behind an account tied to my OSU email. I used that account heavily while I was a student, then stopped using it after graduation. Google deactivated it for inactivity and deleted the blog with it. There were probably warning emails; I never saw them because I no longer had access to the inbox.

That’s the short version of what made me rebuild from scratch.

The longer takeaway: “it’s on the web, so it’ll be there” turns out to be a weak assumption when the platform owns the account and the account owns the content. If I want the work to stick around, I have to host it somewhere I actually control.

Why Vercel#

The first attempt was GitHub Pages with a custom domain. That fell apart fast.

So the stack is Zola for the site generator, Duckquill for the theme, Vercel for hosting.

POSSE#

While picking apart how to maintain this blog over the long term, I came across the IndieWeb movement and the Small Web community. The principle I took away from both is POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

POSSE means primary content lives on my own domain. Anything I post on Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever else is a syndicated copy with a canonical link back here. The version on my site is the source of truth; the platform versions are mirrors.

It’s a small refinement on POSE (Publish Once, Syndicate Everywhere), with one important difference: POSE doesn’t care where the canonical copy lives, POSSE does. For me that distinction matters because the failure mode I just lived through — platform deletes the account, blog vanishes — is exactly what self-hosting is supposed to prevent.

What I’m going to do with it: restore the old posts, write new ones, and keep the canonical copy here.