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Moving my Glitch apps to my own web server

About six weeks ago, Glitch announced that they’re shutting down. Glitch was a platform where you could make websites and web apps, with a heavy emphasis on creativity and sharing. You could read the source code for any project to understand how it worked, and remix somebody else’s project to create your own thing.

Unfortunately, Glitch is shutting down project hosting today. If you had an app on Glitch, it’s about to stop running, but you can set up redirects to another copy of it running elsewhere.

I’ve created redirects for all of my apps, and moved them to the web server that runs this site. This was pretty straightforward, because all of my “apps” were static websites that I can upload to my server, and they get served like the rest of my site:

Not all of my Glitch apps made the jump – I deleted a couple of very early-stage experiments, and I have yet to spin up new copies of my Chinese vocabulary graph or the dominant colours web app. I might port them later, but they’re not static websites so they’re a bit more complicated to move.

Glitch felt like a throwback to the spirit of the early web – the platonic ideal of “view source” and “anyone can make a website”. I always liked the idea of Glitch, and I enjoyed making the fun apps that I hosted there. I’m sad to see it close – another space for playful creativity crushed by the commercial tide of the web.