74 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
74 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: About this blog
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description: The very first article of this blog
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tags:
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- blog
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- tech
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- hugo
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---
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If you are reading this it means either you are trying to understand who I'm
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(are you a recruiter by any chance?) or you are simply bored. In any way, this
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is the very first blog post, and it means you have come to the end of the road
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(since this is the beginning). I always loved to have a place where I can write
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down my thoughts about a new technology, a framework or what I did in order to
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achieve a goal in a hobby project. That is not all though: I was searching for a
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place where I was also able to express my ideas regarding modern dilemmas like
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privacy issues and decentralization. I am not the kind of guy who likes social
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networks, so I never had the chance to express them. Until now.
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## How this blog is built
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### The website
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This blog is a very simple [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) website. If you do not
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know what it is, its basically a static website generator. It takes Markdown
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documents and converts them in HTML pages. If you applied a specific theme then
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it builds the page according to that theme. Hugo has a huge selection of themes
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in his [dedicated page](https://themes.gohugo.io/), so basically picking up one
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and starting from there is very simple. If you are curious about how I made it,
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you can check out the source at my [personal git server
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instance](https://git.poldebra.me/polpetta/bitdispenser.dev), where I started
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hosting my code when [Microsoft bought
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Github](https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-github/). I
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have simply picked up the simpler and cleanest blog theme out there, following
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's idea:
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> less is more
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It will be a success if more than two people actually starts reading what I
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write here, at least I want them to read without this blog without having their
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eyes bleeding with an extravagant color combination.
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### Hosting
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The real problem of hosting a website nowday is not how to build it (as you can
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see) but _where_ you can host it. There are plenty of cloud provides: AWS,
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Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Scaleway, etc... every day there is a new one
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popping up. They all offers the possibility to host your website pretty easily,
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especially if the website is a static one like this (e.g. using a S3 bucket).
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Since I like challenges and I also like to learn new stuff, I though that
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hosting the website in this way was boring. At the same time, I wanted to have a
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good uptime and to not meddle too much under the hood. My (dream) requirements
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were:
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* always up
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* good response time
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* possibility to host as much data as I want
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* using a hosting free as in beer and free as in freedom
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Now, reading this I imagine you are thinking I'm going crazy, and maybe I'm, but
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that is not the case. In fact, multiple weeks prior to writing this article,
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while trying to kill the boredom caused by COVID-19 lockdown, I discovered
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[IPFS](https://ipfs.io/). I already heard of it at University, but I never
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bothered too much to understand what was about. I though "well, it surely is
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some sort of filesystem". I was somewhat right, but not the way I thought.
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IPFS acts like a peer-to-peer network, where nodes hash the content
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they want to share to let other nodes grab it. You can grab this content using
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your local node or using one of the many available gateways. Nodes can "pin" a
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file too, in order to keep it locally and to serve it to other nodes. If a files
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gets pinned by different nodes and gains traction it basically becomes
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undeletable from the web.
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<!-- TODO add multi page hosting section with IPFS -->
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