pico.sh!
Wow, pico.sh looks very enticing.
I found it last night after reading Brennan’s post, Free Speech and the IndieWeb, which discusses the reasons he doesn’t use Cloudflare. See also his longer post on this topic.
I have been feeling a little dirty about using Cloudflare for hosting this little indie blog. Plus, Cloudflare frustrated me this week when it wouldn’t update my broken site (my fault for breaking it; Cloudflare’s for not letting me fix it). So Brennan’s post provoked me to look for alternatives. I searched for options that allow deployment of static sites via rsync, and I soon beheld pico.sh.
I’d signed up and had my site deployed to pico pages in a matter of minutes. Truly, less than ten minutes, including the time to sign up and pay for a year of pico plus, which is only two bucks a month.
This is my deployment command:
rsync --delete -rv ./public/ pgs.sh:/blog
Et voila: https://sal-blog.pgs.sh/
What I’m liking so far
Other than reading docs, it seems I interact with pico.sh entirely over ssh and rsync. Auth is handled via ssh key. If I want to chat with the community, I use IRC with pico’s provided bouncer. Account notifications are provided via a unique RSS feed. This is all so geeky and awesome.
Deploys use actual rsync, so I can see which specific files are being updated, how much data is being transferred, etc.
I was wishing for that kind of transparency when Cloudflare’s wrangler tool was refusing to update my site this week.
This also gives me control over the deployment: I can upload only specific files or glob patterns, use --dry-run to preview the operation, etc.
Speaking to some of Brennan’s points, pico.sh has a Code of Content, which currently reads:
- Don’t upload content if someone else might own the copyright to it
- Don’t upload gore
- Don’t upload “hate speech” (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.)
- Don’t upload material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime
- Don’t upload illegal content, nudity, or adult sexual content
- Don’t upload content to spam users
- Don’t upload content to employ social engineering tactics in an effort to trick users
- Don’t impersonate someone else
In short, don’t be an asshole. I like supporting a service that is willing to take a stand on that.
The founders are active on HN, and I like their vibe.
Their blog is filled with transparency about the evolution of the product, and they use RFCs with their community to help guide the direction.
There’s a lot to like so far, and I’m only an hour into this!
What’s next
I’ll keep poking around to learn more, run some tests, etc.
I need to get redirects working. It looks like they use the same format as Cloudflare. Wonderful.
If I’m still feeling this good about it in a day or so, I might just point my domain at it!