I have been working on something similar this morning. I want to create a simple blog to document my thoughts without having to deal much about technical stuff and maintenance and spend a few hours diving the rabbit hole of jekyll blogs.
While their documentation(https://jekyllrb.com/docs/) is one of the best resources to learn, I have found my job much more straightforward using one of the pre-built themes that is available on the internet. With deployment to github pages almost instantaneous, I can see myself updating the blog much more often.
Minimal mistakes is a great theme. I had almost decided on minimal mistakes when I wanted to upgrade my blog from a simple two column Hyde theme. But then I wrote the template from scratch using bootstrap-5 as I felt that gave me more control and I took it as opportunity to develop my frontend skills. Here is my blog:
Same happened to me with Astro. Yes, it’s much more involved initially because you have to set up the entire layout, but after that, adding content only pages is just writing Markdown. And for the layout, with the help of Tailwind and TailwindUI, it’s pretty easy for a non-designer.
6 comments already complaining that this isn't "simple".
I suggest we instead treat this post as if the title was "Show HN: a simple text blog demonstrating how to use Cloudflare workers and KV store" - that way we get to have a more interesting conversation.
Simple would be if you would just write text files, drop it somewhere simple, either a webserver or GitHub pages or some hosted service, and be done with it.
It's quite a smear to write "He's probably unemployed at the moment or just brushing off before the next interview.". Cheap smears are a form of casual dismissal and devalue this site.
I think what would be amazing is if WhatsApp creates a mobile number based website which anyone can access if they know the mobile number. Access through whatsapp mobile app.
I tried this out and found it useful for exploring Cloudflare workers. One thing I learned: KV and durable objects are not the same thing. KV is eventually consistent, durable objects is the thing where all traffic has to be routed to the same node since it's dealing with a read/write store that has read-after-write guarantees.
This is great, thanks! It's always useful to see these "here's how to do something useful with a new technology" demos, and I've been wondering how Cloudflare's offerings work exactly, so thanks!
Now we need the equivalent thing for Durable Objects! Maybe a chat room, hm.
This is nice, apart from a quick play when they were new I've never really looked at CF Workers and KV again. This made me go and have a look at the docs and find that it's actually looks quite useful. I didn't know they'd added Python and other languages, so that's cool in itself.
I like Jon's example here, a single and fairly short file that does just enough to demo this all, nice.
Sure it's only taking a webhook, reading an API, looking up a db entry and then updating via API.
But just knowing it's running on someone else's infra and there's so little code to validate is very comforting.
Prior to this I had a version running on a VPS and yeah I can do it. But you end up with a LOT of code / config to run the web server, the queue, the database... And any of that could be introducing bugs and security problems.
I'm building a blog directory/reader/search engine [1] on Cloudflare Workers with D1 as the main database. Very pleased with the ecosystem, including Queues and scheduled jobs. DB migrations are simple, local development is a breeze (scheduled jobs don't work though, but there's a simple workaround), and the DB is an SQLite implementation. I am worried about vendor lock in, but as long as I keep the app relatively straight-forward, it shouldn't be a huge deal to migrate to some other Node or Deno backend.
I like it but not that enthusiastic about JavaScript echoing html. What about having simple html templates that call back to the worker for the posts and the worker return json?
Yeah it is gross interweaving html fragments randomly but I wanted to see if I could do it and keep it all constrained to one file. Thanks for the feedback.
Thought this was really cool, so I reimplemented[0] it in Val Town[1] using their blob storage[2]. Mine's a bit longer because of I got a little more elaborate but it was a fun exercise.
it's far from simple, because you need to use several technologies at once, why not do it so that you can just copy it to the hosting and it will work right away? especially since it's a microblog
53 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadWhile their documentation(https://jekyllrb.com/docs/) is one of the best resources to learn, I have found my job much more straightforward using one of the pre-built themes that is available on the internet. With deployment to github pages almost instantaneous, I can see myself updating the blog much more often.
The blog which I am currently working on: https://jagadeeshposni.github.io The theme I have used: minimal mistakes
https://prahladyeri.github.io/
I suggest we instead treat this post as if the title was "Show HN: a simple text blog demonstrating how to use Cloudflare workers and KV store" - that way we get to have a more interesting conversation.
(Submitted title was 'Show HN: Simple Text Blog")
It's literally a single file with 80 lines of code. At this point the only thing easier is a linux one-liner to serve a file directory over HTTP.
Like, has anyone ever used Jekyll, Hugo, Ghost, Jr, Wordpress or any other blog system? None of them are anything close to 80 lines of code.
This seems actually very complicated for what it does.
Imagine if the title was this instead: "Show HN: a simple text blog demonstrating how to use Cloudflare workers and KV store"
Simple would be if you would just write text files, drop it somewhere simple, either a webserver or GitHub pages or some hosted service, and be done with it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also Cloudflare KV provides a simple dashboard interface for adding and removing KV entries: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1e072d04960616970381a433bfca7...
Now we need the equivalent thing for Durable Objects! Maybe a chat room, hm.
I like Jon's example here, a single and fairly short file that does just enough to demo this all, nice.
But the maximum DB size is 10GB (https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits/).
Really?
I built this little service to add UK specific political location data to Action Network CRM. 300 lines for the actual service!
code here: https://github.com/jms301/ANUpdaterUK/blob/main/src/index.js
Sure it's only taking a webhook, reading an API, looking up a db entry and then updating via API.
But just knowing it's running on someone else's infra and there's so little code to validate is very comforting.
Prior to this I had a version running on a VPS and yeah I can do it. But you end up with a LOT of code / config to run the web server, the queue, the database... And any of that could be introducing bugs and security problems.
[1] https://minifeed.net/
I am sure there is a free-tier, but if we skip that and pretend we are paying for it from the beginning.
How would much 100.000 hits be?
I presume it would be a tiny number, A esp given the current content in the blog. so lets imagine some photos and heavier content.
How difficult would it be to extend with with CF CDN?
The subscription is 5 USD a month, including 10M hits at 30ms each, 10M w, 1M r, 1M d, 1M l, and also 1GB.
One of the examples in their page (for a fully dynamic website, which is worst case) is: Subscription $5.00
Requests $1.50 (15,000,000 requests - 10,000,000 included requests) / 1,000,000 * $0.30
CPU time $1.50 ((7 ms per request * 15,000,000) - 30,000,000 included CPU ms) / 1,000,000 * $0.02
Total $8.00
[0] https://www.val.town/v/nbbaier/simpletext
[1] https://www.val.town/
[2] https://docs.val.town/std/blob/