Starting a blog!

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 02:28:20 -0800

Starting a blog is hard work, so how did I do it?

Well, it all started with a friend who isn't a friend anymore starting a blog of their own. We'd met on Cohost and watched the site fall apart. Afterwards, they decided to start a blog, and did something I took inspiration from: They developed a custom file type to make writing posts a bit simpler. I started looking into how I could do that myself.

Since I already had an Apache server up with a basic website, I figured just throwing it up there would work. And that's when I figured out that CGI is a thing. See, the friend's blog backend was written in PHP, which is... fine. But I wanted to see about using Rust, since I'm rather fond of the language. I wanted to avoid making it too complicated, though. Sure, I could write my own webserver, but that'd require making my own security systems and everything. And that's where the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) comes in.

Turns out there's just a protocol for you to write a script or program that Apache can call, retreiving the info it needs through the standard output. So, in order to get a basic script working in Rust, all you have to do is:

fn main() { print!("Content-type: text/html\n\n"); }

This is really easy to use, albeit a little irritating for debugging purposes. But still, that was enough for me to start work on making a simple file type that contains all the data I need in a minimal format. That way, I can use simple scripts, not need much network traffic or disk usage, and get a blog working without needing to manually update an rss.xml or carefully tune every bit of an HTML file.

The fact that I took over 5 months to actually finish putting it together is irrelevant and I'm just gonna say it's because my job keeps me too busy.

But with all that, I got a basic blog working! You can see it all here, clear as day. It's not too fancy, but I'm happy with how it's turned out so far. I'm sure I'll extend it with more features, but for now, I'm happy to just see it working at a basic level. These pages are generated via CGI, as is the rss.xml file itself! So it's fully automated in what's the easiest for me. We'll se how it scales, but that's for future Syntaxxor to worry about. For now, I think I'll get sleep. And think about all the things I can do for my next project.

I already have like 8 ideas it's not even funny please send help