Finish first article

.gitattributes

@@ -1,2 +1,4 @@
 *.png filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
 *.ico filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
+*.jpg filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
+*.jpeg filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

config.toml

@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ relativeUrls = true
   dateform        = "2 Jan 2006"
   dateformShort   = "2 Jan"
   dateformNum     = "02-01-2006"
-  dateformNumTime = "02-01-2006 15:04 -0700"
+  dateformNumTime = "02-01-2006"
   themeColor = "#494f5c"
   homeSubtitle = "Yet another ordered dispenser of bits"
   footerCopyright = ' &#183; <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>'

content/english/posts/about-this-blog.md

@@ -1,73 +0,0 @@
----
-title: About this blog
-description: The very first article of this blog
-tags:
-- blog
-- tech
-- hugo
----
-
-If you are reading this it means either you are trying to understand who I'm
-(are you a recruiter by any chance?) or you are simply bored. In any way, this
-is the very first blog post, and it means you have come to the end of the road
-(since this is the beginning). I always loved to have a place where I can write
-down my thoughts about a new technology, a framework or what I did in order to
-achieve a goal in a hobby project. That is not all though: I was searching for a
-place where I was also able to express my ideas regarding modern dilemmas like
-privacy issues and decentralization. I am not the kind of guy who likes social
-networks, so I never had the chance to express them. Until now.
-
-## How this blog is built
-
-### The website
-
-This blog is a very simple [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) website. If you do not
-know what it is, its basically a static website generator. It takes Markdown
-documents and converts them in HTML pages. If you applied a specific theme then
-it builds the page according to that theme. Hugo has a huge selection of themes
-in his [dedicated page](https://themes.gohugo.io/), so basically picking up one
-and starting from there is very simple. If you are curious about how I made it,
-you can check out the source at my [personal git server
-instance](https://git.poldebra.me/polpetta/bitdispenser.dev), where I started
-hosting my code when [Microsoft bought
-Github](https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-github/). I
-have simply picked up the simpler and cleanest blog theme out there, following
-Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's idea:
-
-> less is more
-
-It will be a success if more than two people actually starts reading what I
-write here, at least I want them to read without this blog without having their
-eyes bleeding with an extravagant color combination.
-
-### Hosting
-
-The real problem of hosting a website nowday is not how to build it (as you can
-see) but _where_ you can host it. There are plenty of cloud provides: AWS,
-Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Scaleway, etc... every day there is a new one
-popping up. They all offers the possibility to host your website pretty easily,
-especially if the website is a static one like this (e.g. using a S3 bucket).
-Since I like challenges and I also like to learn new stuff, I though that
-hosting the website in this way was boring. At the same time, I wanted to have a
-good uptime and to not meddle too much under the hood. My (dream) requirements
-were:
-* always up
-* good response time
-* possibility to host as much data as I want
-* using a hosting free as in beer and free as in freedom
-
-Now, reading this I imagine you are thinking I'm going crazy, and maybe I'm, but
-that is not the case. In fact, multiple weeks prior to writing this article,
-while trying to kill the boredom caused by COVID-19 lockdown, I discovered
-[IPFS](https://ipfs.io/). I already heard of it at University, but I never
-bothered too much to understand what was about. I though "well, it surely is
-some sort of filesystem". I was somewhat right, but not the way I thought.
-
-IPFS acts like a peer-to-peer network, where nodes hash the content
-they want to share to let other nodes grab it. You can grab this content using
-your local node or using one of the many available gateways. Nodes can "pin" a
-file too, in order to keep it locally and to serve it to other nodes. If a files
-gets pinned by different nodes and gains traction it basically becomes
-undeletable from the web.
-
- <!-- TODO add multi page hosting section with IPFS -->

content/english/posts/hello-world.md

@@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
+---
+title: Hello world!
+description: The very first article of this blog
+tags:
+- blog
+- tech
+- hugo
+date: 2021-05-18T22:22:00+02:00
+---
+
+If you are reading this it means either you are trying to understand who I am
+(are you a recruiter by any chance?) or you are simply bored. In any way, this
+is the very first blog post, and it means you have come to the end of the road
+(since this is the beginning). I always loved to have a place where I can write
+down my thoughts about a new technology, a framework or what I did in order to
+achieve a goal in a hobby project. That is not all though: I was searching for a
+place where I was also able to express my ideas regarding modern dilemmas like
+privacy issues and decentralization. I am not the kind of guy who likes social
+networks, so I never had the chance to express them. Until now.
+
+## How this blog is built
+
+### The website
+
+This blog is a very simple [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) website. If you do not
+know what it is, its basically a static website generator. It takes Markdown
+documents and converts them in HTML pages. If you applied a specific theme then
+it builds the page according to that theme. Hugo has a huge selection of themes
+in its [dedicated themes page](https://themes.gohugo.io/), so basically picking
+up one and starting from there is very simple. If you are curious about how I
+made it, you can check out the source at my [personal git server
+instance](https://git.poldebra.me/polpetta/bitdispenser.dev), where I started
+hosting my code when [Microsoft bought
+Github](https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-github/) (you
+can find a copy of the repository on Github too, visiting [my
+profile](https://github.com/Polpetta)). I have simply picked up the simpler and
+cleanest blog theme out there, following Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's idea:
+
+> less is more
+
+It will be a success if more than two people actually starts reading what I
+write here, at least I want them to read this blog without having their
+eyes bleeding with an extravagant color combination. 
+
+Last but not least, the website icon is literally the Team Fortress 2 dispenser
+(one of the games I love and one of the first game I started playing online as a
+kid when a decent connection at home was finally available), taken from the RED
+team and generated via a [favicon generator](https://realfavicongenerator.net/).
+The name of the website partially came out from that, and from the fact that
+basically every website is a dispenser of bits, and it is only thanks to our
+beloved browsers we are able to actually "consume" what is distributed in the
+first place.
+
+{{< figure src="/content/hello-world/engiwithdispenser.png" alt="Engineer with his dispenser" caption="Engineer class with a dispenser. Thanks to [Team Fortress wiki](https://wiki.teamfortress.com) for providing the image I shamelessly downloaded from them" >}}
+
+I hope Valve will not sue me for taking that assed as my website favicon. I
+swear I will change it, a day. Pinky promise.
+
+### Hosting
+
+The real problem of hosting a website nowday is not how to build it (as you can
+see) but _where_ you can host it. There are plenty of cloud provides: AWS,
+Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Scaleway, etc... every day there is a new one
+popping up. They all offers the possibility to host your website pretty easily,
+especially if the website is a static one like this (e.g. using a S3 bucket).
+Since I like challenges and I also like to learn new stuff, I though that
+hosting the website in this way was boring. At the same time, I wanted to have a
+good uptime and to not meddle too much under the hood. My (dream) requirements
+were:
+* always up
+* good response time
+* possibility to host as much data as I want
+* using a hosting free as in beer and (possibly) that could use free as in
+  freedom technologies
+
+Now, reading this I imagine you are thinking I am going crazy, and maybe I am, but
+that is not the case. In fact, multiple weeks prior to writing this article,
+while trying to kill the boredom caused by COVID-19 lockdown, I discovered
+[IPFS](https://ipfs.io/). I already heard of it at University, but I never
+bothered too much to understand what was about. I though "well, it surely is
+some sort of filesystem". I was somewhat right, but not the way I thought.
+
+IPFS acts like a peer-to-peer network, where nodes hash the content
+they want to share to let other nodes grab it. You can grab this content using
+your local node or using one of the many available gateways. Nodes can "pin" a
+file too, in order to keep it locally and to serve it to other nodes. If a file
+gets pinned by different nodes and gains traction it basically becomes
+undeletable from the web.
+
+#### Choosing the right tools
+
+Surely, as [the IPFS documentation
+describes](https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/websites-on-ipfs/multipage-website/), I
+could have done it by myself. But there is a but. Holding all the infrastructure
+manually means sacrifice the "always up" and "good response time" thingy for two
+simple motives:
+
+1. the [server where I host my drafts & codebase](https://git.poldebra.me) is
+   hosted on a very small machine (2GB of RAM and 2vCPU), very easy to kill with
+   the slightest of loads
+2. in order to achieve a good response time, a CDN or some sort of caching is
+   necessary (even if the application is stored in a distributed file system)
+   
+   
+{{< figure src="/content/hello-world/fleek.png" caption="Fleek website, that I used to automate my deployment on IPFS and my DNS update" alt="The fleek website screenshot" class="right" >}}
+
+Finally, in order to achieve full automation with DNS updates, I would have
+needed to implement and use NameCheap APIs (currently it is the DNS provider I
+use for most of my websites). "What's the difficulty?" one would ask. [Here is
+the official documentation](https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/intro/), and
+even if the APIs look promising, while studing them my will to live decreased a
+little bit, and so I decided that if I wanted to get up and running with less
+maintenance as possible, with a good uptime while having the maximum
+automatization possible I needed to rely on a dedicated service. Luckily
+[fleek.co](https://fleek.co) was what I was searching for. They currently
+provide the possibility to buy a domain from their website, giving them all the
+hassle of updating the new website on IPFS, distributing it, refreshing a very
+possible CDN and finally to update the DNS records accordingly. This, as you can
+imagine, provides multiple benefits:
+
+* I do not have to care about my very little dev machine getting hugged to death
+  by request in the remote case any of my posts get any attention
+* I do not have to focus on automating the process someone else has already done
+  for me
+* I can focus on writing posts after dinner instead of scratching my head trying
+  to understand why the website does not load/the DNS is not properly updated
+
+## Future improvements
+
+For sure, this is only the beginning. Having an automatic workflow of spell
+check, deployment and release would be the first milestone. Future features for
+this website could be an automatic posting of every new article on a dedicated
+Mastodon bot, so that people can possibly discuss about my thoughts on the
+fediverse, a decentralized network.
+
+To conclude, the frequency of this blog will be...whenever I have time to post :grin: Of course I need content before posting something, and this require some time for myself for experimenting with new technologies and learning new stuff, so I do not expect very much posting, but only time will tell!