Server Shutdown and Kitbox Retirement Notice
About this decision
If you still remember this site — thank you.
I have been keeping renfei.net alive for years: first WordPress, then a Spring Boot backend I wrote myself, and now this static rebuild on Astro. The site watched me go from student to engineer. It was never a high-traffic place, but it means something to me.
The shock from the AI wave, though, is real.
Ever since ChatGPT took off, traffic here has been sliding — not a slow decline, a cliff. Most readers who used to arrive from a search engine now just ask an AI. Search traffic itself is shrinking, and the room left for personal blogs keeps getting smaller. I wrote the whole story down in "I'm Shutting Down My Server: AI Finally Finished Off the Barely-Breathing Personal Blog" if you want to read it.
With the traffic gone, the cost of keeping a backend server online around the clock stopped making sense.
What this changes
The backend server is gone.
The site is fully static now, served from a CDN. Posts, archives and the about page all still work; anything that depended on a live API does not.
Some Kitbox developer tools have been retired.
Tools that needed server-side computation no longer work, including but not limited to:
- Tools that called third-party APIs from the server
- History features backed by a database
- Tools that encrypted or decrypted on the backend
Tools that run entirely in the browser — encoding converters, formatters, calculators — are unaffected and still work.
Why not just close the site?
Honestly, I thought about it.
But there are words here I have been writing since 2013 — technical notes, bits of life — and deleting them felt like a waste. A static site costs almost nothing to keep, so leaving it up hurts no one. And if the urge to write ever comes back, this place will still be here.
To everyone who used to read this
Thank you to everyone who ever stopped by.
Personal blogs were the thing to do in 2013, a nostalgia project by 2020, and today they are mostly stubbornness. I do not regret it, though. Writing forced me to organise my thinking, and running the site taught me a great deal. Those were real gains.
If you have a site of your own, keep writing — even if only for yourself.
— RenFei