Doin' too much": 💥😖 Time for a micro/macro blog rethink?

Sunday, November 12, 2023

At some point yesterday, my Wordpress instance (thus the place where the thing you’re reading right now came from) ran out of memory.

🤔 I suspect it’s because I’m asking it to do too much:

And all on a tiny underpowered VPS instance.

Now if I could have things my way, I’d really prefer a clean install of GoBlog like I had before but with an easier way to post photos, follow people thru RSS/#Fediverse, and connect to different networks in the same manner. Something like a Wordpress|Tumblr|Friendica mashup (basically smoosh Firefish and Hubzilla together…) I decided to go back to using Wordpress instead becaus

  1. My skillset for Go vs PHP is smaller. Go as a language is easier though so it's only a matter of time...

  2. Since the above is true, I'm not sure how to keep it locked down and optimized; I've been dealing with Wordpress for like 20 years already so I understand this beast.

  3. I only have time for one impossible project at a time:

A line art picture of someone doing too many tasks. The boy has 6 arms flailing about juggling balls, papers and books. There are bystanders asking him to do these things.
My Wordpress instance trying to handle all I throw at it.
To remedy the memory issues, I could stary by using a minimal template¹ and throw some CSS at it to make it look like a TUI app in a terminal. Kinda like Jamie Tanna's site. Of course Andrés Cárdenas site is also something to aspire to as well as Tim Bachmann's. (Speaking of, did he ever get that one commenting plugin project off the ground?)

Next, I’ll make sure the thing is optimized. This also means not only the instance but the underlying supporting software too. I’m pretty good at that part though since my day job also demands it. I’m running this thing on Caddy (told you I was gonna force some Golang into my life!) and a very lean MariaDB container. Don’t be surprised if I wind up making a Nix declaration for this set up and make it so I only need to back up one thing everyday to get back up and running instead of the three I need to do now.

I’ll continue to optimize things around here and make it work the way I want it. I’ll make sure to get a colophon page going really soon so I can let y’all know how I did it; I still think this is the best way to enjoy the best of all worlds in the #fediverse and within the world of #indieweb enabled blogospheres.

If anyone has experience with any of the above, reach out to me via this post or just in general at @starrwulfe@starrwulfe.net, @starrwulfe@micro.blog or @starrwulfe@vivaldi.net

¹: Kinda started this just now with this new template file that I’m slowly adding custom CSS to… 

#Article #Blog #meta #fediverse #indieweb #tech glitches/failures #wordpress