> But what if you want to learn the basics of renting a virtual private server (VPS), spinning it up, and configuring it to run your website? Is learning the nitty-gritty of server setup obsolete these days? Maybe, but it's fun! So this is why I'm going to spend the rest of this blog post going highlighting my personal checklist for provisioning and hardening a VPS!
that's really interesting to hear. so you're saying people got fatigued once "Web 2.0" was becoming a thing? (not that Web 2.0 started with social media, but I think it blew up in the early 2000s at least).
Well. We Bitnet Relay people got bored by the taste-, and faceless IRC crowd suddenly appearing. What a bunch of uncultivated newfags they were. The ultimate watering down of internet quality however were the AOL and Compuserve CDs popping up everywhere and connecting the plebs to the holy lines. These people even didn't uudecode alt.binaries.tasteless... /s
"I think there seems to be a weird phenomenon going on right now, where a new online subculture is popping up, full of people who are burnt out on today's Internet and looking for ways to purge themselves of their online accounts, myself included. 2005-2015 is when I would argue were the best years for this subculture. You had cool new social networks popping up like Youtube and Facebook, really addictive games like Runescape, World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, Neopets, and meme culture came in full force with Lolcats and Rage Comics. People online were still more outcast-ish, and it wasn't necsesarily cool to be "terminally online," which is a phrase that you'll hear often today. Being online and part of these communities was new and fun, and there was this feeling of belonging to an "in crowd." It was less formulaic and everything you saw felt new and original."
"95% of the time I can just use the ORM to make simple queries in a easy to maintain way for your application. For the 5% of queries that are either complex or can't be easily represented via your ORM of choice, declare the expected type response and use that escape hatch to write your performant SQL."
site creator here - yeah this is the approach i'm taking now. the ORM is useful for sure and there's still a benefit to using it, but anything that needs to read from a few different tables, i'm definitely going with raw SQL
i am not! right now, i'm mostly just using it for performance monioring - how many MS are my queries taking and how long are my first-contentful paints on the front-end
the denylist on the site is actually pretty quite simple. for now, it's just a list of chunks of words and the form validation will just compare the username against that list, where each chunk in the list if used as a regexp
You could also consider shadow banning these users. If you're immediately preventing them from creating accounts with certain usernames, they'll probably just get more creative with the profanity or save it for their posts.
hey i'm the author of this site! going through comments now, but looks like i still need some work to do because all this traffic caused some slowdown :(. Looks like adding a caching layer is next.
