SHIPPEDRebuilt the whole web presence: 2 sites, 5 repos, $0 a month

The old setup was one Ghost blog on a DigitalOcean droplet doing everything badly at once. The new setup is two static sites: stories at meshrahman.com, procedures here.

Numbers from the rebuild:

• 2 sites, built from markdown in git, deployed to Cloudflare Pages on merge
• 5 repos in the new org (sites, redirect worker, telemetry service, ops)
• 20 redirect rules covering every URL the old site ever published, running in log-only mode until every destination checks out (a validation script asserts 301 to 200 on all of them before the flip)
• 8 essays and 2 guides migrated to their new homes so far
• $0 per month hosting, down from a ~$12 droplet (the droplet retires after a quarantine period, snapshots verified first)

The part nobody tells you: the actual build was the fast part. The slow part was the redirect map, because “no link dies” is a one-line principle and a multi-day audit. (Worth it. Some of those URLs have been collecting search traffic since 2022.)