I acquired a new, fancy domain for a new side project. A site with tips on how to save money on purchases is something I would like to start. The search for a CMS reminds me of why I built GoBlog: all available options are not optimal. But GoBlog also isn’t optimal for this project for various reasons, as it shouldn’t be a typical personal blog. And now I have this really cool domain and question my plans. 😅

SourceHut, a source code hosting service, is banning cryptocurrency- and blockchain-projects:

These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as ransomware, illicit trade, and sanctions evasion. These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment. The presence of these projects on SourceHut exposes new victims to these scams and is harmful to the reputation of SourceHut and its community.

We recognize that the basic idea of a blockchain, as it were, may be generally useful. However, most projects which market themselves with blockchain technology are subject to the same social ills as cryptocurrency. Consequently, we have chosen to include “blockchain” related projects in this ban for the time being.

That’s a really good summary, in my opinion. I’m not deep into the cryptocurrency and blockchain topic, but I don’t want to be, because everything I’ve seen so far has always been unnecessarily complicated and could be solved more easily without blockchain, or were just made-up problems.

Because I used Prometheus and Grafana at work, I also tried them at home and I must say, monitoring isn’t as boring as I always thought. Next up Kubernetes? 😅

I already shared “98.css” on my blog in 2020. It’s a CSS framework that styles semantic HTML to look like Windows 98.

It was recently reshared on Hacker News and I found the creator’s comment about it:

Hey HN - author here.

This was my burnout recovery project in April of 2020. Very much a labor of love and a surprising way to realize I still liked programming. I wrote some scattered thoughts here.

I also “run” this project quite differently than I usually do - when I receive a pull request instead of merging it I do a quick glance through the user’s github to make sure they’re not a spammer before giving them commit access and asking them to merge their own PR. It has worked wonders.

That’s a pretty interesting aproach to managing an open source project. Let’s hope nobody does a force push, removing everything. 😄

Now my question: Did somebody already use this project for a blog design?

Maybe it wasn’t the best decision to name my blog software “GoBlog”, because it has a negative meaning in Indonesian. But whatever, I won’t rename it now… I even bought a domain with the name.

GoBlog syncs the editor state between browsers in real-time now. ✨ Thanks to WebSockets!

This way I can start writing on one device, continue on another and publish from just another one. WebSocket connections get also reestablished, when they fail, because the Internet connection changed etc. This was a fun programming evening. 😄

Tomorrow I will continue with some issues from GitHub…

Some IndieWeb protocols are complicated and there are sometimes no programming libraries to simplify the use of them, but ActivityPub is another beast. Although the standard is documented, the way the specific implementations (Mastodon etc.) work often isn’t and it’s hard to debug. So huge respect for the big rework. 👍

Another change in my infrastructure setup: I replaced rathole with Chisel. There wasn’t any particular reason, I use it in the same way: It’s making a few services and websites hosted on my home server available on my VPS to publish using Caddy and a static IP. Chisel is just a bit more simple to configure using command line flags. And it’s written in Go.

One year ago, I started using AdGuard Home instead of Pi-Hole to filter DNS requests and block ads and tracking. Yesterday, I switched to NextDNS instead. NextDNS has mostly the same features, but is hosted in the “cloud” and I have one less self-hosted service to care about. AdGuard Home is awesome, but NextDNS seems to be working great as well and also integrates with Tailscale easily.

I am using Nitter, an alternative interface for Twitter, just in case I want to read a thread on Twitter. Previously I hosted the instance directly on my VPS. Now, however, I host the Nitter instance at home, but make it available on the Internet through Tailscale, a little program I wrote called “ProxyExposer”, and Caddy. 🤓 I also briefly tried publishing a WordPress instance from home to the web this way. But I don’t have a use case for WordPress at the moment.