partly_cloudy

> But what if you want to learn the basics of renting a virtual private server (VPS), spinning it up, and configuring it to run your website? Is learning the nitty-gritty of server setup obsolete these days? Maybe, but it's fun! So this is why I'm going to spend the rest of this blog post going highlighting my personal checklist for provisioning and hardening a VPS!

that's really interesting to hear. so you're saying people got fatigued once "Web 2.0" was becoming a thing? (not that Web 2.0 started with social media, but I think it blew up in the early 2000s at least).

"I think there seems to be a weird phenomenon going on right now, where a new online subculture is popping up, full of people who are burnt out on today's Internet and looking for ways to purge themselves of their online accounts, myself included. 2005-2015 is when I would argue were the best years for this subculture. You had cool new social networks popping up like Youtube and Facebook, really addictive games like Runescape, World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, Neopets, and meme culture came in full force with Lolcats and Rage Comics. People online were still more outcast-ish, and it wasn't necsesarily cool to be "terminally online," which is a phrase that you'll hear often today. Being online and part of these communities was new and fun, and there was this feeling of belonging to an "in crowd." It was less formulaic and everything you saw felt new and original."

it's a nod to https://somethingawful.com, which always put the people who were banned or put on timeout in a public list

https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php

"95% of the time I can just use the ORM to make simple queries in a easy to maintain way for your application. For the 5% of queries that are either complex or can't be easily represented via your ORM of choice, declare the expected type response and use that escape hatch to write your performant SQL."

site creator here - yeah this is the approach i'm taking now. the ORM is useful for sure and there's still a benefit to using it, but anything that needs to read from a few different tables, i'm definitely going with raw SQL

i am not! right now, i'm mostly just using it for performance monioring - how many MS are my queries taking and how long are my first-contentful paints on the front-end

also for errors from the BE and FE

the denylist on the site is actually pretty quite simple. for now, it's just a list of chunks of words and the form validation will just compare the username against that list, where each chunk in the list if used as a regexp

who you callin old man i'm still in my 20s!

hey i'm the author of this site! going through comments now, but looks like i still need some work to do because all this traffic caused some slowdown :(. Looks like adding a caching layer is next.

hey sorry about that - you should be approved now and i went ahead and added a message for un-approved users so they'll know before they make a post

hey sorry about that - you should be approved now and i went ahead and added a message for un-approved users so they'll know before they make a post

hey i'd love to know more if you wouldn't mind helping! where exactly in the world are you located and in what ways are you seeing poor performance?

ok man

yeah he just had some stupid racist username

he had a racist ass username so i changed it

haha oh totallllyyy. i started writing the backend back in february of last year and i just had issue after issue, but overall super fun to solve the problems

i'm also curious how you got into making a product around it

yep you need to be manually approved for now! you should be good to post now but let me know if you're still locked out

i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again

so annoying -_-

yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.

thanks! yeah it's definitely not COMPLETELY true-to-form because i still do think a lot of modern design works for a reason, but i appreciate the words!

sorry man. this guy won't leave the site alone and keeps posting really racist shit despite me continuing to block his IP addresses over and over.

dang good call!! updated!!!

remix has some good built-in APIs for creating SEO-performant pages. everything is server-side rendered for starters, but it's also easy to add meta tags for each page in your react component routes

not yet, but definitely in the future!

yup

yep the Python backend is a standalone rest API and the FE is running on a completely separate server

actually at the time i wrote the API, i was still considering how the FE was going to be written, so because i never used remix until this point, i didn't realize they offered an all-in-one solution.

honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust

built in remix.run with a Python backend, basementcommunity is a nod to early forums from the early 2000s like something awful and fark, focusing on manual moderation and discussions happen in chronological order