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| title | description | tags | |||
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| About this blog | The very first article of this blog |
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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 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, 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, where I started hosting my code when Microsoft bought 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. 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.