Subtitle: Programming Towards Death#
2023 is over!
2023 is the first year of the post-pandemic era
2023 is the year of AI
2023 is the best year in the next 10 years
This sentence can be said again next year
But in 2023, my biggest feeling is like a philosopher
Start thinking about the limits of life and death
Start thinking about what happens before and after death
Because in this year, too many people around me, online, have left
- Left forever!
If someone asks me what changes there are in my blog at this time
It's all about the question of "what happens to my blog if I die"
Hmm, programming towards death
Well, let's be open-minded, this is an unavoidable topic
Changes#
Yihong once said:
People Die, but Long Live GitHub
I agree with all his ideas, except I don't think GitHub will necessarily live long
My reason is that the Qin Dynasty perished, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Nokia declined, right?
But this doesn't affect my trust and goodwill towards the Cyber Bodhisattva
This domain name and ID are very personalized things, and there is no intention to inherit them as digital heritage
So what did I do to keep my personal Icon?
1. Domain Name Transfer#
The first thing I did was transfer the domain name to Cloudflare and enable automatic renewal, which ensures that as long as Cloudflare doesn't go out of business, my domain name will continue to exist. There don't seem to be many options that don't cost money, right?
There is an interesting design here: if there are no changes or operations on the blog within 180 days, the DNS resolution of the blog will automatically switch the A records of the root domain and the www domain to GitHub Pages. This judgment dimension is something very private, so I won't say it. This is done to ensure that the blog remains online even if the commercial service currently used expires. When designing this, there was also an interesting thing. The first thing that came to my mind was not death, but what if I went to jail, this would also switch automatically.
2. GitHub#
Starting a few years ago, I have been using GitHub repositories as the only data source (still need backups in two places). Later, GitHub also launched GitHub Actions, so besides storage, building and deployment can all be done on GitHub. If the network of GitHub Pages is not authenticated, then everything can be done on GitHub.
3. Static Resources#
In the recent updates of the blog, all remote dependencies of the blog have been removed, except for the comment system.
Pages like "Whisper", "Movie", "Goods", "Penta", and "Links" all rely on remote data, but they are rendered statically when building. Although most of the reasons are for blog performance. But even if the API is down, these pages will still be intact, only the content will remain at the moment of the last build.
CDN resources have also been removed. Static blogs themselves support CDN deployment for the entire site. Since the entire site is on the CDN, why use third-party CDN resources? There is also a logic that if the blog can be opened, then the same-origin resource files can be opened, but if the blog cannot be opened, what is the point of referencing third-party resources? But this is definitely a matter of personal preference. For example, some people may choose different CDN service providers for cost reasons.
4. Theme#
The last time I changed the theme was on December 12, 2022, which has been more than a year. This time, I made a wise decision to introduce the theme as a Git Submodule:
git submodule add https://github.com/eallion/hugo-theme-doit.git themes/DoIt
All custom optimizations and beautifications are done in my own blog project files, without any invasive modifications to the theme. Based on Hugo's template lookup order, Hugo will automatically render according to the template priority, the advantage of doing this is that the blog's theme is separate, and the theme can be upgraded independently and completely.
5. www#
After transferring the domain name to Cloudflare, it is not possible to customize the configuration of NS servers, and Cloudflare's NS servers must be used. Because Cloudflare comes with CNAME flattening and cannot be turned off, this causes the CNAME of the root domain to not be perfectly resolved to the CDN in mainland China. After a week of various attempts, I finally decided to redirect the blog to the www domain, so the main site became www.eallion.com. This changes the structure of the blog that has been in place for more than 10 years, it is a big change, but also a small change, after all, it is a personal life blog, there is no content that affects the public. Currently, the most cost-effective and Anycast-supported domestic CDN seems to be Tencent Cloud's EdgeOne. Currently, www.eallion.com is deployed on Tencent Cloud's EdgeOne, it's not dead yet, let's talk about it when it's dead.
Others#
I didn't make a detailed outline before writing, and I always feel like there's something I haven't written about. I'll add it later.