Kinda important blog post

2024-01-05

UPDATE: Email server works now.

Today, I just want to talk. There are several things I want to talk about so whatever. Here goes.

Take a look around.

Yeah, if you've made it this far without noticing it yet, the site got a massive makeover. It was completely rewritten from scratch by me in about a weekend or so. I have been trying to get better at PHP and I've been learning it alongside tools like SQL as well as other tools in my arsenal such as C++ and I think the best way to learn is to use the tool you're learning.

So, yeah. In short, I wrote a website generator that runs on the server and generates an HTML site from Markdown. But, unlike projects like swiki it goes much deeper than that. This site generator also supports user accounts, nearly complete web administration, special syntax (VERY powerful) and a customizable modern looking UI without being too bloated. It wasn't made specifically for the site though, it is a standalone project as well which you can now go and use if you so wish. I've named the project csgen which stands for CoolSiteGENerator because I couldn't come up with something that sounds better than that.

It is still lacking in some areas. For one, it doesn't distinguish blog posts from regular posts, even if some of the csgen specific syntax allows it to act in this way. This also means that RSS feeds are not yet supported, and yes if you have not yet figured it out that means my site does not have any RSS feeds. What a shame.

The size of the other site was getting out of hand. I mean, when you have to start symlinking, that's when you know it's an absolute mess. While I used PHP sparingly on my last personal page, the same cannot be said about this one. While inline HTML is available, it is not required and not even used in most cases, it's all markdown and more specifically, the csgen syntax. I won't elaborate on this holy syntax but you can check out the Git repository for csgen if you want to know more.

But, what does this mean for you, the end user? Well, It should be a bit more neatly organized. I threw out a lot of pages that I deemed useless. But it means that some pages that previously worked will now 404, and some of them had their location changed, including all of the blog posts. I tried to keep project pages the same, though. It also means that you can comment on my blog posts now, including this one. I'm sure someone wanted that, right? (just pretend to agree) In any case, in order to comment you do need to register an account, but when you've done so you will be able to comment on the pages where comments are enabled, so really all of the blog posts or pages where I'll ask for your input.

Important email news

There are some important things I have to share regarding the state of my email server, and various things like that. In short; if you have sent me email at any address on the speedie.site domain since I switched away from Cloudflare (in other words, approximately September) I have not received it.

I have no excuse, I'm sorry for being such a lazy fatass but more importantly, I failed to inform you about it. While, I guess I'm technically not obligated to do so, it was definitely irresponsible of me and I apologize for it. Does this mean you can send me email right now, then? No, it is still broken. This happened when I switched from Cloudflare to simply using the domain registrar DNS. I didn't know about the problem until much later, and instead of informing people about it or actually fixing the email problem, I instead wasted my time on other useless things.

But, to tell you the truth I couldn't have fixed it anyway, and the reason is quite interesting. I've had a DuckDuckGo email for a long time. Essentially, they offer a service called Email Protection where they filter and then redirect the email to your actual email. They do not use usernames or anything like that. Instead, whenever you want to log in, they simply send a code to your forwarding address. So, later I changed the forwarding address to my self-hosted email address but when that server broke I was no longer able to log in. So, to change the forwarding address I would have to get my email server up and running. Only one small problem with that. My domain registrar account was registered using this email address, and so the result is I could not change my DNS records, and I could not log into any of the accounts that I had registered under this email address. Now, I did resolve this problem because DuckDuckGo support is awesome and changed the forwarding address for me after I emailed them about it, but it was definitely a close call.

I know that was kind of rambly but in any case, I plan to get the problem sorted soon (which means hopefully this weekend) by setting up a new email server from scratch but I have no idea how that's going to go and I am not super confident in my abilities but I hope I at least end up with a functional server. I mean, surely I can't make it worse, can I?

For now, if you need to send me email, send it to my Gmail address which is speedie DOT alt AT gmail DOT com because I'm guaranteed to receive emails sent to it. But honestly, I'd rather you avoid emails all together.

EOF

Finally, I'd like to end off this blog post by saying I have plenty of ideas that I'd like to do this year, both for the site and just general projects. I'd like to do more writing and more programming than last year.

In any case, that's it for today. Have a good day.

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