Writing again after a long time

I stumbled upon microfeed a few hours ago, and suddenly I felt the urge to start writing (or blogging...) again. I really like the simplicity of the CMS. Just perfect and nice for my use. Simple UI, simple theming, simple backend, and easily managed. Purrfect!

The tech stacks involved are based on Cloudflare's Pages, R2, D1, and Zero Trust with GitHub Action as the deployment medium, all free (as long as you stay under their free tier usage) and easy to deploy with simple and clear instructions provided.

The development is still in Alpha, but it doesn't really matter to me. I've been using Cloudflare for many years since ~2010 and having all the serverless functions under one roof truly is a delight. And yes, I dislike Azure and AWS, as they're unnecessarily complicated for personal use and their free tier is not that generous.

Anyway, a little bit of backstory, I start/stopped blogging around ~2006-2010. I was using the free WordPress-hosted platform and then moved on to self-host as I wanted to use my own domain as I was learning PHP, web stacks, etc., and was so enthusiastic to self-host everything on my own, from the web server, email, etc. you name it, I have it. However, over the years, I was struggling with the incompetence of the web hosting providers. At that time, website defacement was rampant, with providers constantly having to fight off web shells, and my site was no exception. There were no OOBE solutions to web hosting providers to tackle the issue, and the providers who have custom solutions (CloudLinux OS, chroot jail, etc.) were just a handful and not really affordable for me. In the end, most providers would just blame the customers for having an exploitable website, using outdated plugins, etc. and they didn't even bother to secure their hosting server, especially if they have a large client base (overselling of course!). I was just sick of having to repeat the same complaints every week, and I decided to take down my site, as I was spending too much time securing it than actually blogging.

And now, almost 13 years later, here I am using custom serverless solutions without having to worry about all the unnecessary setup! 😁