Previously, I had a website on cargo.site (childrenofthesun.one)¹ ⤵︎

I paid $99/yr on top of $13/yr for a custom domain with my paltry military pay (on hindsight, not a good use of it). It seems the price has gone up since (now $14/mth billed yearly = $168)².

In comparison, setting up this website using Github Pages is free, and the custom domain (.xyz domains are some of the cheapest) costs $6/year. So that's 5% of what I used to pay, and 3% of what it would cost now.

I will say that cargo is excellent for showcasing portfolios, which was my main purpose 3 years back. I didn't have much programming knowledge then, and cargo is easy to set up and use for non-programmers and those who are more visually inclined. It is to hard-coding HTML & CSS what Microsoft Word is to LaTeX (i.e. WYSIWYG, and I think services like cargo are also known as content management system platforms, or CMS platforms).

Some things I miss about cargo:

• complimentary font selection (partnering with foundries like Dinamo)
• zoom in options for images on tap (I'm sure there's a way to do that on here as well, but I haven't looked into it yet)
• clean wireframe and reference templates
• easy to apply transitions/animations
• unorthodox image/gif filters
• custom gallery layouts with movable images

But oddly enough, optimising for mobile/tablet screens with cargo is a lot more difficult that it appears. I remember spending much time fiddling around with different viewports, making sure everything looked OK on various screen sizes. These sorts of details are important to me.

With HTML & CSS, this snippet of code was all I needed:

And right now, tinkering around with raw HTML & CSS (w/ some javascript) is a lot more enjoyable. Getting the layout exactly how I want is also somehow easier than using the 'blocks' that cargo has. It is a little sad to lose the ability to quickly build a complex layout using cargo, but I really don't need anything too fancy for right now³.

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1. Going through my small archive of website iterations on cargo, there's an odd smattering of found words and images on there which I might want to revisit and reshape one day. ↩︎

2. But what's nice is that non-profit organisations and students at one of their select institutions (e.g. RISD, ArtCenter College of Design) will have access to cargo for free. There's also the option of getting a faculty member to apply for membership to the program. ↩︎

3. And I don't have to worry about migrating to other platforms, or depend on cargo.site to run indefinitely. Currently, this entire website can be stored on a folder or hard drive that takes up <30mb. I do want to clean up the files someday though, and optimise my website to use less space and run even faster (re: low tech magazine). ↩︎

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