bitdispenser.dev/org/posts/hello-world.org

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
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: how-this-blog-is-built
:END:
*** The website
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: the-website
:END:
This blog is a very simple [[https://gohugo.io/][Hugo]] 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
[[https://themes.gohugo.io/][dedicated themes page]], 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
[[https://git.poldebra.me/polpetta/bitdispenser.dev][personal git server instance]],
where I started hosting my code when
[[https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-github/][Microsoft bought Github]]
(you can find a copy of the repository on Github too, visiting
[[https://github.com/Polpetta][my profile]]). I have simply picked up
the simpler and cleanest blog theme out there, following Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe's idea:

#+begin_quote
less is more
#+end_quote

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
[[https://realfavicongenerator.net/][favicon generator]]. 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.

#+CAPTION: Engineer class with a dispenser. Thanks to [[https://wiki.teamfortress.com][Team Fortress Wiki]] for providing the image I shamelessly downloaded from them
#+NAME:   fig:Engineer with his dispenser
[[../media/hello-world/engiwithdispenser.png]]

I hope Valve will not sue me for taking that asset as my website
favicon. I swear I will change it, a day. Pinky promise.

*** Hosting
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: hosting
:END:
The real problem of hosting a website now day 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 [[https://ipfs.io/][IPFS]]. 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 can not be deleted from the web.

**** Choosing the right tools
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: choosing-the-right-tools
:END:
Surely, as
[[https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/websites-on-ipfs/multipage-website/][the IPFS documentation describes]],
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
   [[https://git.poldebra.me][server where I host my drafts & codebase]]
   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)


#+CAPTION: Fleek website, that I used to automate my deployment on IPFS and my DNS update
#+NAME:   fig:The fleek website screenshot
#+ATTR_HTML: :width 600px
[[../media/hello-world/fleek.png]]

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.
[[https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/intro/][Here is the official documentation]],
and even if the APIs look promising, while studying 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 automation possible I needed to rely on a dedicated
service. Luckily [[https://fleek.co][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

The only downside to this approach is that Fleek provides limitations on
how much data and bandwidth you can host. At the time of writing, you
can only host up to 3GB (enough for this website) and have a 50GB
bandwidth (that is fine for now) for the free version.
[[https://fleek.co/pricing/][Upgrading you account]] to one of the
available plans give you extra space and bandwidth.

** Future improvements
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: future-improvements
:END:
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!