Hello, World!

Written on: 2024-09-04

Hello world! This is my first post on this website.

I've made and remade this site several times over a few years but I'm hoping that this time I actually do something with the website - for context, I've spent a very long time messing around with making a script to generate posts like this from Markdown files, but have not dedicated nearly enough time to actually writing any posts. There's an XKCD comic somewhere which graphs/compares the number of posts on a website against the framework/website setup, showing that people who write barebones HTML with little/no CSS tend to produce the most valuable and productive content (the best example I can think of is Donald Knuth's website), people who use frameworks like Gatsby and Hugo are somewhere in the middle mostly producing good content, while people like me who decide to implement their own static site generator spend more time writing the generator instead of actually using it. In addition to this, I've not even dedicated enough time to writing code, meaning in six years I have nothing to show: little to no coding experience and even less practise writing long form text.

Hopefully that changes today.

This post is going to be about this website and some of the choices I made around it (in particular and ironically, the script I use to generate this website). It's not meant to be informative or useful to anyone but me - it's either the first or the last nail in the coffin of my lack of productivity, marking the end of one era and inshallah the start of a new one. I hope.

DNS and Hosting

At their core, websites need 2 things: somewhere to put it (a hosting solution) and something to find it (a domain). Technically you don't even need a domain - if the hosting solution is connected to the internet you can find it using the IP address, but that is not particularly useful and it's easier to think of/type in hakmad.com instead of 12.34.56.78 or some other IP address. I'm going to talk about both hosting and DNS in the same section because in the past I've always considered them simultaneously. (That doesn't mean you should do that - they are completely different things after all - I just happen to do things that way.)

This section is going to talk about these a little bit (along with some other things related to it) documenting my journey from GitHub to Cloudflare. I hope it's a little insightful.

In The Beginning (GitHub Pages)

In the beginning, when I first wanted a website, I used GitHub pages. GitHub pages is nice, but I had 2 main gripes:

1. The domain would be hakmad.github.io which I didn't really like (I wanted something simpler).
2. URLs can be inconsistent: I didn't much fancy any of the big frameworks (to be honest I had no idea how to even get them up and running) so I wrote an earlier iteration of this script to generate HTML from Markdown files. To prevent GitHub from using Jekyll to try to generate website you had to create a .nojekyll file at the root of your repository and then create bare HTML files. This in itself is fine, but then the URLs can be... annoying. For example, when you first navigate to the website, you navigate to the root (/), but navigating to a particular page and then navigating back would result in going to /index.html. Not every page showed this - if you navigated to /index GitHub would happily serve you index.html with no issues. This .html extension that would appear inconsistent was very grating for me and I wanted something that was consistent one way or the other - either no extensions at all or extensions all the time.

This second point was particularly annoying to me but was also something that I let get in the way of my productivity for a long time. As a result, I hardly ever wrote anything and spent more time looking at alternatives or "perfecting" my script to generate the site. I also didn't particularly like the domain, and was very puritan about the fact that it should look neat and tidy: hakmad.github.io doesn't say neat or tidy to me, it says uncool and ugly. I think what I really wanted was to have my own domain, something that was mine and mine alone. I may stand on the shoulders of giants but I'm me, not one of hundreds of warts on the giants back.

Grand Plans (Ionos)

Eventually, I got a job so I could afford to spend money on things like domains and other things. I had enough money that I decided to ditch the idea of using GitHub pages completely and for a while I wanted to self host, but a physical server seemed wasteful environmentally and moneywise so instead I searched on the internet and came across Ionos, which provides VPSs and domains as well as a host of other internet things. After looking at the reviews, I decided to give it a go. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a server running in a (kind of) isolated environment on top of a (typically shared) physical server. The shared resources can be concerning if you host sensitive data or you're running an application which demands as much as possible from the platform but for my usecase it was ideal - I ran an SSH server to connect to/control the server and a HTTP server to serve content. I had grand plans for it and even executed on some of these: I wanted to host my email, private files, calendar, contacts and much more on this server (maybe even running a Minecraft server) but only managed to figure out how to run FTP, CalDAV and CardDAV in addition to the above. Email is really freaking hard to get right and frankly it's worth paying someone else to do it for you. We depend on email so much for so many things, and I've heard plenty of horror stories about people losing access to a key communication system over night because they forgot to pay, or the hosting provider went down, in addition to the nightmare that is email delivery.

(Looking back, another good thing was not putting all my eggs in one basket. I paid IONOS for both the VPS and the domain. If IONOS were to fail, I'd lose access to everything which would be incredibly worrying.)

I enjoyed learning about hardening an SSH server, I got spooked by random spray attacks attempting logins and learnt about tools like fail2ban, ufw and iptables/nftables to prevent things like that. I had fun trying out different softwares for hosting CalDAV/CardDAV (and ended up losing most of my contacts at least twice because I decided to put all my contacts onto an E2EE platform and then promptly lost the password), and had a similar experience messing around with FTP software (Seafile is pretty neat!). But I digress.

Besides SSH (it's so undescribably cool being able to run commands on a server half the world away), the most fun thing was actually setting up and running a HTTP server. That moment, where you type in some obscure commands from a docs page that hasn't been updated in years and then hop on your browser, navigate to your domain, and seeing something - a fancy HTML site all styled with CSS and a sprinkle of JS, a plaintext document, a file, even the placeholder page that Apache serves when you first start the web server - that moment is magical. You're no longer just someone who browses the internet. You're a part of it. You contribute to the wonderful place we call the internet.

Anyway. I messed around with 3 different HTTP servers, namely Apache, nginx and Caddy. Apache and nginx were kind of overkill for what I wanted (static site hosting) but it was a fun learning experience figuring out how to get them up and running (and also how to get them to play nice with other services I wanted to run). Caddy was the coolest though: the configuration was easy, effortless and readable, the documentation was thorough and covered many use cases (including rewriting URLs to remove extensions or redirecting www to point to just the website) while also being simple, it felt light and powerful, and best of all, there was HTTPS out of the box. No extra configuration needed. (I should note that this is a static website, there's no dynamic content being served here so yes, HTTPS doesn't really matter, but still. It's nice to have.) Sometimes I think I miss hosting on a server, but really I just miss Caddy.

The main reason I moved away from using a VPS was actually a simple one: cost. I was paying about £6 per month (which is cheap) but when compared to other offerings such as GitHub pages which does the same for free - I just didn't feel like I was getting my money's worth. I had also given up on the pipe dream of hosting my own email and had been burned too many times by losing contacts/calendar information (my own fault), and other projects like hosting a Minecraft server or running a more fleshed out website seemed out of reach. (I never tried. I should have.) The experience was valuable, but in my mind it was a waste of money to continue paying for a service when free/more reliable/both alternatives are available, so eventually I moved off my VPS and started hunting again for an appropriate solution.

Back To Reality The Cloud (Netlify and Cloudflare)

I didn't want to go back to GitHub pages because I knew that I'd get annoyed by the issues I'd faced previously and try something else. I also didn't want to go back to VPS's because I felt like I'd get overconfident, tempt fate, lose, and then fall from the sky like many an Icarus before me. So I started looking for alternatives and found 2: Netlify and Cloudflare. To be honest because all I do is serve plain HTML, I can't really tell you the difference between the two other than Cloudflare is more reliable (it's Cloudflare, they're massive), has better documentation and has a larger community. The main reason I chose Cloudflare was actually because around the same time I also decided to move my domain away from Ionos. I chose Namecheap to begin with because they seemed cheap, but then moved to Cloudflare because they hiked the prices a little more than I expected them to and it just seemed like a better idea to have all of my eggs in one basket - running the website and the DNS one service makes sense to me.

(I know what you're going to say: "but hakmad, isn't putting all your eggs in one basket exactly what you recommended against not a few paragraphs earlier?". Yes, but this and that are different. If Cloudflare Pages fail, it doesn't matter if the DNS works, no one will see my website. If Cloudflare DNS fails, it doesn't matter if Pages works because no one will see the website and the internet will be on fire. Plus, I'm just running a simple website in one basket, not trying to store most of my digital life in a service that will potentially fall apart. It boils down to this: realistically, I can afford to have my website disappear for a while because at the end of the day it's nice to have, and if it breaks it breaks. I can't afford to lose my emails, personal contacts, and whatever else I potentially would have had stored online. That's it.)

So. Here I am, having tried lots of different things and eventually settling for Cloudflare. In the future I might get an itch to try (semi or fully) self host again. If I had my own place, it would be pretty cool to run my website off a Raspberry Pi or some small home server which is attached to the internet 24/7, but alas, I am poor and do not have my own place so that is a dream I will save for the future.

Website Design Choices

This section lists out some of the different choices I've made (stylistic or otherwise) when making this website. I'm going to say less on this because here I'm just listing out my opinions, and frankly there isn't more to say other than a few words justifying or explaining a certain choice. I'll try to be a somewhat comprehensive but I'll probably leave some stuff out.

Some these design choices might be rethought in the future, depending on the sort of content I write (I'm fairly confident that I'd add something like Pygments or some other code highlighting tool) but I think that most of these are good because they help keep things simple. And if things are simple, I can focus on other things. Like actually doing. Like actually writing.

That was the plan anyway. I hope to write a lot more in the coming months and years inshallah. I've started a new job but I want to learn, grow and develop and hopefully use this as a platform to document that and share it. I hope it's worth your time reading this. Thank you for doing so. :)