Sunsetting atpage

Hi!

I decided to sunset atpage, the thing I built that allows you to publish HTML websites to your ATProto PDS, and that powered my website/blog.

I took this decision because more often than not I ended up refining rough edges or tweaking the theme or some other thing.

I figured if I really want to get better at writing I should find a way to do so without being disturbed by side-quests.

I feel like my attention span is so limited I have to make a conscious effort to remove distractions from my writing space, and adding the complexities of a distributed protocol, Rust, WASM and Service Workers to the writing process doesn't help!

It's undeniable that I had fun writing atpage, it was my first foray into Service Workers and WASM, and I think it's still a great idea - dealing with payload optimization and multi-browser compatibility was a pain but it was also very rewarding.

Given my incompetence lack of experience with the Web platform, this model started to become more of an hassle than something that I enjoyed working on.

One time, the entire website broke because I missed a recursive call in an HTML tree exploration function, and it did not manifest until the fourth post!

In looking for a platform that simplifies the writing process substantially I recalled someone already built a "competitor" to atpage, called leaflet.pub ... Which is where you're reading this post now!

I like how they modeled the writing experience around discrete blocks, each containing rich-text or media content of sorts, like website embeddings or social media posts.

The way they organize your publications, how they let you control very little in terms of design, it's perfect to provide my brain with a break from the tinkering process that dominates my days, pushing me to just get some words out and have a good time.

It also lets me write from essentially everywhere, since drafts are stored on their servers.

A neat thing about leaflet.pub is that if you log in with an ATProto identity, your website is stored on your PDS, not too dissimilar from atpage!

I think they cache your posts on a backend service to optimize for performance and to avoid overloading PDSes - it would be great if in the future they allowed to fetch content from a PDS directly, maybe as an opt-in feature for self-hosters?

I'd also love if we could provide CSS colors for dark and light mode, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that requested this feature.

That said, breakfast is here and I'd really like to get to my ham toast before it gets cold :^)

Until next time!