https://willow.al/enContents © Willow et al Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:42:39 GMTNikola (getnikola.com)http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rsshttps://willow.al/posts/new-clearnet-domain.htmlWillow et al<p>So, besides <a href="https://domainnamewire.com/2025/03/11/icann-moves-to-retire-soviet-era-su-country-domain-name/">ICANN wanting to phase out .su by 2030</a>, it looks like <a href="https://www.atakdomain.com/en/blog/ru-domain-registration-guide-esia-requirement-trustee-service-and-transfer">Russia is getting stricter with their domains</a>. Basically since I'm not Russian, just a vaguely communist person who thinks a Soviet Union domain is pretty cool, it would cost me twice the price to keep willow.su, and I wouldn't be able to transfer it either. Fortunately, willow.al (as in Albania) is cheap and it gels as "willow at large". Unfortunately it looks like registration is handled manually lol. Also there's no WHOIS server, which I didn't even know is allowed :O</p> <p>I don't like this domain as much as my .su but I guess all good things must come to an end.</p>https://willow.al/posts/new-clearnet-domain.htmlThu, 23 Jul 2026 02:54:14 GMThttps://willow.al/posts/hello-world.htmlWillow et al<h2>The site</h2> <p>In case you missed the footer, this is using <a href="https://getnikola.com/">Nikola</a>. I wanted something lightweight and fast, so I was gonna go with <a href="https://gohugo.io">Hugo</a>, but I find Go's <code>text/template</code> rather annoying to work with. So I tried out <a href="https://getpelican.com/">Pelican</a> briefly, but apparently it doesn't do incremental compilation very well, and that is important to me. Next I looked at Nikola and I quite like it! It does support incremental compilation (although it's kinda slow to start up, so that may not pay off for a while) and it uses <a href="https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/">Jinja</a> which I quite adore &lt;3</p> <h2>The comments</h2> <p>Getting comments on here was quite a journey. I wanted something that federated over ActivityPub, so I first tried <a href="https://pinka.dev">Pinka</a> but I couldn't get it to federate properly. So then I tried <a href="https://blog.leahdevs.xyz/p/federated-blog-comments/">Leah's Mastodon-API fetching script</a> along with <a href="https://gotosocial.org/">GoToSocial</a> and a read-only API key. Turns out there's a bug in that script which doesn't allow top level comments from other servers. At this point I was running out of options, so I ended up just going with <a href="https://isso-comments.de">Isso</a>, which is an old Python project that just does local comments and nothing else. I really wanted federation though, but I figure this is even lower friction because it doesn't require an account.</p>https://willow.al/posts/hello-world.htmlThu, 16 Apr 2026 06:27:25 GMT