How do I build sus.fr ?

Ok, as usual I’m having an existential crisis(tm) on how I put together my site. I always have these really great and creative ideas, then I put it in to effect, then I hate it.

Right now I’m right there at the hate it stage and my target is sus.fr. When I originally put it up, it was to get all my journal entries back in to my own hands (this is going to be a familiar theme here, so sit down for it).

Back in the day I managed to pull everything into a WP instance, for the record it should be stated that I’m not exactly a fan of WP, while I appreciate it is a thing that does the job for some people, it doesn’t fit my needs in the slightest. It’s over engineered, riddled with security problems, super bloated, and generally a pain in the ass to maintain. After that I pulled it all to Hugo which was great to keep my content static, but in the end it took fucking ages to churn out every update and I kind of abandoned that whole project. Oh and obvs accidentally deleted all the data I pulled in because I’m a fucking idiot.

I moved on to my project OH.MG which had similar things occur, everything got wildly over complicated and I didn’t have the ability to control what I wanted. Inevitably, I changed that until I found the current incarnation did what I want - serve text over different protocols and not really bother with the web.

Earlier this year, when I found sus.fr was available, I made my application to AFNIC and decided to use this as my web thing. I did this by installing WP and running with that.

My current WP install is nearly 300mb and this is with all the assets uploaded to a S3 bucket and served over a CDN and the database is about 200mb. Half a gig and every day it demands I update something.

I tried WriteFreely before and I still have an instance hosted at write.om.gay, but I really don’t feel the love, it is far too thin, and although federated doesn’t actually let you get conversations, oh and you make one change to the settings and the fucking thing crashes.

When I was looking for options I came across Plume, I really do love it and it has the features I’m looking for - independent, federated, and has an API to manage my content. The problems though are a bit there - the dev isn’t really working on it, the docs are problematic, figuring out the API is difficult, and people start up instances that end up becoming zombie SPAM bots because they left open registration. It also really lacks any ability to handle that SPAM when it gets federated in to your instance.

I did run a self hosted one at home, but I made a few errors - I picked a machine with low disk space that started to creep up to totally full, I used Docker which I barely understand and have nothing but contempt for, and I gave up on trying to find a solution to the API. In the end I wiped the machine to deal with something else.

Recently as I’ve had the time to work on my personal projects, I’ve come back to this section, I tried to use WP as a core to host not only my new and old journal entries but also the other things I’m up to. It’s really not working out as well as I hoped, the static content doesn’t visually fit and the theme I’m using is basically the best of hours of searching.

I stumbled across a CMS - Yellow which I’ve been giving a try out of interest, this is really great for the more static things I want that don’t require so much changes to happen (and thus not having to get WP to churn out ever visit). Now this puts me in a position of I want to move Wordpress to a subdomain and use Yellow to do the highlight reel. This means moving literally everything and when I do that do I continue to keep sus.fr in a state that I’m not totally enthusiastic with ?

The answer is obviously no I ain’t doing all that shit for nada fuck you very much.

This brings us to today - I have two virtual servers from Oracle on their free tier (I KNOW BIG DATA), I don’t have any spare machines at home that’ll be suitable for hosting Plume, and my internet speed to do such anyways is so poor you could really see a problem when loading up my Plume.

This setup, gives me the ability to run Plume again in a more stable environment and I’ve set it up with a sqlite database and without fucking Docker. I’ve also been able to break my way in to the API so this is a good start.

the tl;dr of all of this is now I’m feeling the Plume vibe again, I’m going to reorganise sus.fr to make it something I’m happy with, and start publishing again using Plume with at some unspecified point making available all my old entries without having to worry about disk space locking me out.