Migrating CDN to Cloudflare R2

I’ve migrated my static images to use Cloudflare R2 as my object store and image CDN. R2 exposes an S3-compatible API, which makes it nice and easy to use the aws CLI to interact with the bucket.

Previously I was (ab)using GitHub’s free image CDN via their user media upload support in Issues (https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/<hash>). However, this is slow and not very idiomatic. For R2, I’ve attached the bucket to my public sub-domain, so raster images are now served from cdn.abstractnonsense.xyz and should load much faster.

I’ve also migrated my inline-footnote Hugo Markdown render hook from overriding image-links to overriding regular-links. Now, relative image paths are prepended with the CDN.

The publishing workflow still involves manually uploading images to the desired path and ensuring the Hugo path reflects it, but I might make this more ergonomic in the future. I’m thinking about building a folder-add triggered Shortcut on my macOS that’ll take care of the bucket syncing.

This closes out a longstanding issue on my blog (#35), with the exception of supporting web-optimised compressed image formats (example solution). There are also some built-in Cloudflare offerings to do image transformations, but I believe they’d cost, and are overkill at this point. It’s also possible to bake in the image dimensions to the HTML image tags at build-time using Hugo’s resources.GetRemote, but for now I’m content enough.

I’m a little bit torn as to whether to start publishing more photos here. On the one hand, I enjoy seeing other bloggers’ photo snaps (especially of nature). On the other hand, I’d quite like to preserve the ethos of having a snappy and minimalist blog. Maybe I can use a subdomain or my library section to compartmentalise my photos. There’s a cool image of a Hummingbird hawk-moth I took in Korea that I’d love to publish…