About The Site

This website works in what I like to think is a rather unique way in the world of modern web-apps, so I thought that it might be interesting to describe it and the rational behind creating it.

The user-facing part of the site is an NGINX server that acts as a reverse proxy to handle TLS/SSL encryption and split traffic between the various sub-domains of that I use (mainly www.sckz.org and files.sckz.org) as well redirection away from some sub domains (like sckz.org). The NGINX server proxies to a Go program that acts as an HTTP web server. This is the main part of the website. The Go program serves the pages of the site from a directory of files that is stored on the device, it also manages a twisted net of shell scripts that generate the content that you see. These scripts are either run periodically, like the kernel contributions page or triggered when something happens, like the posts page when a new post is created. This is why all the date codes, for example, look like output from the *nix date command, because they are. Finally, it runs some extra secured form pages that allows additions of updates, changes to the status and creation, deletion and editing of different pages from anywhere.

I think that modern web development is shifting more and more toward ever more complicated, JavaScript filled nonsense. The people complaining about centralized corporate control over the internet are the same people incorporating data from four different CDNs run by billion dollar companies into their sites and tweeting about it on Twitter, exactly what they stand against. The internet, as it once was, a collection of computers transferring data they owned over a wire is decentralized. My goal was to return to a simpler time, one of true decentralization (not that I dislike the corporate web, I actually quite like it, what I don't like is dependency on other services.) This website is dependent on nothing but FOSS software and electricity, and I like it that way.

Thanks for reading!

~ sckzor