I had my little Smashburgers in Bend website on Astro on Cloudflare Pages. While I 💜 both of those things, CodePen hosting is more than capable, and that’s obviously extremely fun and satisfying for me.
I had the Smashburgers site on Astro way back when because they supported multi-page view transitions in a really nice way, polyfilling it in browsers that didn’t have it yet. But time has moved on, and I consider it a progressive enhancement anyway, so the Pen now just uses native multi-page view transitions and falls back to nothing. This means just static HTML pages! The Pen doesn’t use any non-default Blocks at all.
I also moved my Breakfast Burritos in Bend website over to CodePen. This one needs some kind of build process (as I envision it), because each burrito is a Markdown file. That’s just a nice way to work on this sort of thing. All the Markdown files are templated and smashed together to build the site. Eleventy absolutely rules at this — it’s the perfect tech for the job.
(Note that Eleventy isn’t widely available as I type; it’s still feature-flagged. Shouldn’t be too long, but feel free to email me if you want access sooner rather than later.)
I also made another little site recently that just lists out some STUFF I WANT. I had a list of these things sitting in my Things app for a while, and it felt like the perfect thing to turn into a little easy-to-manage website.
I used React on this one with our new React + Vite Block on CodePen. I did it that way because I knew Vite could also suck in Markdown files and work with those, which is how I wanted to do it. But it doesn’t support SSR right now, and that kinda sucks. It should probably be Eleventy in the end. I picked React because there was some fun libraries I was looking at I wanted to try, but it didn’t end up working out.
The thing I want to express here is the “no additional cost” feeling of it all.
Yeah, I have to pay to have chriscoyier.net, but I’ve done that for decades and always will. I’m pro ownership of domains, for sure. But subdomains don’t cost anything extra. They are literally free, just a CNAME DNS record you slap on there.
Yeah, CodePen PRO is required to deploy sites, have more than 3 files, and use site builder (“Base”) Blocks, and CodePen PRO costs money. But additional Pens don’t cost anything; you can make as many as you want. It doesn’t cost anything extra to host another site on CodePen (while under the limit, which is more than most will need). And a lot of people have CodePen PRO for a bunch of reasons (asset hosting, collaboration, AI, privacy, etc.), so the hosting might just feel like another benefit.