I'm still alive, I promise.

Edit, 2021-01-03: I no longer host my own screenshots, and as such, the below image no longer exists. It is still a setup I was and am proud of, however.

For the few of you that actually look at my blog, you’ll notice that it’s on a different domain now.

I recently acquired joscomputing.space on sale over at Namecheap. Around the same time, I began using Google Cloud Platform’s Always Free and it works beautifully. I have the server set up using the latest non-LTS version of Ubuntu (at the time, Zesty Zapus) and plan to keep it at stable. The main site is being proxied using apache’s mod_proxy due to Github Pages messing up with SSL.

I’ve also created my own screenshotting app for macOS, and it works beautifully. I’ve put the source up over at my Github. Always Free allows you to use 5 GB of storage in Cloud Buckets, with a specific amount of egress. For my usages, the egress is cheap enough. Last month, I paid $0.18 USD in combination with some other projects I was doing.

The app takes advantage of macOS’s built-in screenshotting feature. It sets up a routine to routinely (hah!) monitor the desktop. If it notices any screenshots, it uploads them to a specified Cloud Bucket, makes it public, and copies whatever URL format you specify to the pasteboard.

As you might notice, the URL is https://i.joscomputing.space/Screen%20Shot%202017-08-17%20at%203.10.22%20PM.png, which in turn redirects to https://storage.googleapis.com/i.joscomputing.space/Screen%20Shot%202017-08-17%20at%203.10.22%20PM.png. If for whatever reason I wanted to change my bucket, I wouldn’t have to redo a lot of logic – change the bucket name in the app, and have Apache use mod_rewrite to the new location.

That’s really all for now, thanks for reading!