Patrick's Place

Why I switched from Godaddy to Cloudflare

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 21:57:00 -0600

I’ve been using GoDaddy for a few years. I have a few domains with them. Eventually I ran into a few snags that lead me to switch to Cloudflare. In this article I’m going to go over why I switched, and a brief overview of the more challenging aspects of setting up Dynamic DNS.

TL:DR Cloudflare wins due to:

Supports root domain CNAME records.
Cheaper domain renewal costs.
Both Godaddy and Cloudflare support DDNS. You don’t need DuckDNS.

Dynamic IPs & Dyanmic DNS (DDNS)

I host my website on a server whose public IP changes from time to time. I don’t have control over when it’s public IP is changed, nor am I notified when it happens. There are a few reasons why this may be the case for you. If you host your site on a server in your home, your ISP might change your IP. If you host your site on a server with one of the major cloud providers, maybe you can’t afford to pay for a static IP.

Where did the Dotfiles desktop environment go?

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 05:34:37 -0600

Photo by Alex Vasey on Unsplash

My dotfiles repo originally was a bunch of dotfiles for Linux. They were tailored towards Arch Linux running the i3 window manager, and several other keyboard driven applications. I envisioned the project becoming a full fledged desktop environment (DE) for link-minded keyboard enthusiasts.

The first commit was back in 2017. I worked on the project up until around 2019. Where has the time gone?

commit 919459e0dadec3b7ac3ef442dcdc45d82523545d
Author: Patrick Motard <motard19@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue May 9 15:37:20 2017 -0500

    Initial commit

At one point, there were bash scripts that automated bootstrapping the entire install of the operating system from scratch. Eventually bash scripts weren’t cutting it, so I moved the instalation scripts to a separate repo called dot-ansible that tied the scripts together using Ansible.

Node Version Manager via Oh-My-ZSH

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 23:34:37 -0600

Photo by Patrick Federi on Unsplash

NVM is a version manager for NodeJS. NVM is used to switch the active version of Node that is being used by your terminal session. Since all of the Node based projects I work in all have their own version of node, NVM allows me to switch between versions quickly and easily.

Like most version managers, NVM has a list places it looks to determine which version of Node it should be using. Most of the projects I work on have a file called .nvmrc in their root that specifies a node version. If you’d like to learn more about how NVM is used, check out it’s README. It’s full of examples and documentation.