Blog

This is a Work In Progress Blog engine to host my own personal blog.

Tech Stack

Infrastructure

• Docker Compose: to simplify cross-platform development & deployment
• Nginx: routes requests to appropriate API endpoints

Frontend

• HTML: Mostly generated from backend
  • html-minifier-next: Minifies HTML files for more efficient net usage
• SCSS: Page styling
• TS: Improvements to Frontend behavior
  • esbuild: TS transpiler and bundler

Backend

• Go: Generates HTML pages from templates, and used as the main API
  • jackc/pgx: go bindings to postgreSQL
  • valyala/fasttemplate: Makes HTML template files more efficient to use
  • google/uuid: Generates random file names without the risk of name collision
• Python: Isolated worker for safe image re-encoding
  • FastAPI: Used to simplify communication between backend and workers (Should remove eventually)
  • Pillow: Used for profile picture re-encoding

Database

• PostgreSQL: Manages user accounts, translations, comments, etc

Current features

• Simple user accounts
• Safely sanitized user profile pictures
• SQL page management
• Simple Bilingual page translation system
• Side by side page editor
• Simple comment threads
• Simple AB testing system

Planned Features (Roughly in planned order)

• Enhance with JS
• A half decent looking fronted
• Selfhost with a domain and HTTPS

Nice to haves

• Early access subscriptions
• SEO optimizations
• Lynx support (No JS or CSS needed)
• Bot prevention with Anubis
• Data analysis panel
• Dead Man's switch to ensure travel safety
• A really good looking fronted
• .onion site available. A Vanity onion would be nice
• Host on a proper server

Account Privilege levels

It would probably be better to switch to something more granular eventually 0. ReadOnly : Not signed in

1. User : Standard User Account.
2. EarlyAccess : First payment tier. Early Access
3. Bonus : Second payment tier. Add additional perks. Might go unused
4. VIP : Third payment tier. Add additional perks
5. Trusted : Friends and Family. Special options if I add a dead man's switch.
6. Owner : Allows for creating pages

Page AB testing system plan

• A cookie should be set by the backend indicating the page version
• One cookie corresponds to multiple pages, with positional arguments indicating which
• The backend needs to share a page index with nginx
• This page index will be used to determine the page cache.
• a blank 2 chars indicates that a test was not decided.
• On first page access, the cookie will update to a random active test
• There should also be a global test cookie, which will also influence the cache