Getting the domain name

But which one do I even want?

There’s this cool site with a lot of info on TLDs and whatnot. An interesting thing to scroll through.

Did you know there’s a .gay TLD? How about .lgbt, .travelersinsurance, .microsoft, or .google? Maybe you would be interested in some .ком, which is just .com but in Cyrillic, because I guess .com.ru wasn’t an option?

But anyways, there are way more other strange TLDs out there, buy you can take a look yourself; this post is about this site, and for this site I initially thought of sklad.sucks, but apparently .sucks kinda sucks: it costs quite a sum & the fact that get.sucks (registrar’s website) was down when I was making my choice didn’t really help.

Eventually I settled on… well, you already know. .observer sounded cool and even turned out to be one of the cheapest option out there.

Buying the thing

Spaceship. Amazing registrar, can’t name a single flaw:

• had the lowest price out there,
• helps Ukraine out a ton by not letting you register a TLD if you’re in Russia,
• actually good website UI, doesn’t make you want to tear your eyeballs out & slam the designer’s head against a wall (which is, sadly, a rarity nowadays);
• 🚀blazingly fast✨ domain propagation. Seriously, the DNS records I set take less than a minute to get from the control panel to 8.8.8.8 & 1.1.1.1.
• They also didn’t try to sell me things that I don’t need and charge extra with some misleading price tags. Which is, unfortunately, also a bit of a rare thing nowadays. Especially with reg.ru. Oh god, reg.ru. Trying to buy something from them is like trying to disable all the cookies on an especially annoying website. Not to mention their prices and the fact that you have to pay extra for WHOIS protection. Funnily enough, other Russian registrars charge even more, so if you compare Russian prices in dollars to USA prices, it turns out that $1 = 150₽, which is two times more than what Google or some bank gives you (77₽ as of writing this).

Making the website

Blog

Static HTML. Rendered from .md files with the help of Zola.

Not much to say here.

The theme I’ve used is apollo. And no, it is not responsible for the awful color palette you’re seeing.

The static content is than served with FastHttpd & proxied through Caddy. But I guess I can just move the static files into the Caddy container.

Speaking of which,

Caddy

It does miracles.

Caddy is basically an http proxy/server, but damn is it versatile.

Subdomain routing? Piece of cake. Just

sklad.observer, www.sklad.observer {
	redir https://blog.sklad.observer{uri}
	log
}

A reverse proxy?

gitea.sklad.observer {
	reverse_proxy http://SOME_ADDRESS:80
}

Everything is https by default, out of the box, zero effort required. Any domain that you mention automatically gets considered HTTPS (unless you explicitly prefix it with http://), and than Caddy takes care of the rest:

• It goes out to Let’s Encrypt and automatically requests certificates.
• It goes through the entire procedure of verifying the ownership of the domain with no extra input required from you (just make sure the DNS for the domain is pointing at wherever Caddy is running).
• It automatically sets up the redirects from HTTP on :80 to HTTPS on :443.
• And, when the time comes, it renews the certificates too.

The logging capabilities it provides are awesome too. The logs are well structured, have many output options, the defaults settings are really good, and the logs themselves include all the important info you might need to troubleshoot a problem.

The format for settings, the “Caddyfile”, is nicely readable and pleasant to write, albeit takes a tiniest amount of time to get used to. But if it’s not your cup of tea or if the config is written by a machine and not a human, you can just use JSON, Caddy supports that too.

Docker

With compose. Probably the easiest way to set up some THING consisting of heterogenous compound parts.

Portable, reproducible, convenient. What else can you ask for? (Well, maybe a better format than YAML for config files, but whatever, I’m not in Norway, so not much trouble aside from port bindings being treated as hexadecimal numbers.)

Git

Gitea was my choice. Minimalistic, easy to set up, pleasant to use. Not much to say here, because it never gave me any trouble (so far).

It’s written in Go. Which bring me to my next topic.

Closing thoughts

Golang

A really good async runtime, coupled with a… peculiar language to say the least. But does that really matter if this language powers so much good stuff. Like this website (not to imply it’s an exemplar of a “good stuff”, but):

• Docker
• Caddy
• Gitea
• FastHttpd

all written in go. Heh.

Time to post about Rust I guess.

The source code

Is it really “code”? It’s mostly just configs and assets, but whatever.

• GitHub
• Gitea

UPD

I’ve got rid of FastHttpd, because Caddy can serve static files too.
That’s one less (fewer?) Golang dependency.

I’ve switched from Zola to Hugo, which is written in Go.
That’s one more Golang dependency.

Zola was also the only non-Golang dependency, so now this site is 100% Go, heh.

But yeah, Zola just felt like an unfinished & shabby rewrite of Hugo into Rust, and wasn’t pleasant to deal with overall. Thanks, Luke Smith, for introducing me to Hugo.