74 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
74 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
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 -->
|