Reviving my blog
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Hey. Hello World again, this is my blog, but in a completely different face now.
It has been a long while since my last catastrophic data meltdown with my homelab where my previous blog was hosted.All is lost after that calamity. I still remembered how I removed the disk and played around the SATA connector. The RAID5 array was never going back on again and all data is lost. As I was 19 at the moment...I did not cry, but one life lesson I definitely learned of: "don't fuck around too much"
Time flied so fast...it has already been 6 years, many things worse than this has also happened...strained relationship with people used to know...getting embarrassed in public events...disappointed in internship for a job I've considered high regards but is actually too hard for me at that time...yet each hurting is a life-learning experience, and what doesn't kill you will only makes you stronger, better and wiser, and I learned a lot along the way.
So in retrospect...I have decided to try again with this "blog"..."Gotta get up, and try and try and try" .
Wait, hold on again Steve. This is not a blog, this is a forum software, right?
If you want a blog, go Medium, Ghost or the good ol' WordPress then?
Why are you using a forum software such as NodeBB and why aren't you writing your own blog using things like Astro or Gatsby?Well indeed...I actually planned on writing my own blog by using headless CMS platform such as Directus or GraphCMS plus Astro/Gatsby, but the key point here is...you guessed it...CMS...no shit sherlock.
And I'm not trying to be sarcastic here. Content/Data is all you need in this AI Era (but pessimistically speaking I think the bubble might burst in few years due to the fundamental flaw in the current state of "AI" relying too much on statistics and predictions).
And to be honest...forum software like NodeBB and Discourse, they actually fall into the category of CMS, too, albeit more focused on community and group communications and less about yourself.
Since Discourse is written in Ruby, which I have yet to master, so if there are any bugs I can't probably fix, and that Ruby in general consumes a lot more memory than JavaScript due to its high dynamism, thus Discourse is no-go.
NodeBB, on the other hand has a very ugly code base, since it was 11 years old (get this: it is still alive and many people run those rotten code today), extremely hard to scale in cloud-native world (forum software are assumed to be monolithic anyway) and also general lack of a healthy plug-in ecosystem unlike WordPress -- people even making business off of it.
But I'm not going to use PHP anymore with their performance and Zend engine and all that compatibility stuff, and the only thing good about NodeBB is its relative simplicity. I can at least fix some bugs and help the development team sort it out, plus I have semi-customizability to hack around.
Given the time concern and the possibility of burning out with self-written blog, thus NodeBB was taken.
Have I forgotten to tell you I'm running this on fly.io infrastructure, like almost entirely, I have even used their integrated serverless Redis database offering to host the forum data.
This whole setup is almost for free because fly.io won't collect expending under $5 at the end of the month. Not so generous but not bad either given the many opportunists who strived to exploit every free resource on the internet for their own personal gain (I gotta say: they're assholes), fly.io is just protecting themselves against the barrage of locusts to suck their money away. It's totally understandable.
This blog Is running in a shared-1x preset with 256mb of memory and 4GB of swap. I won't intend this will be a high traffic blog. I will make a write about all my deployments in fly so soon.