15/04/2023, 14:28In keeping with the design philosophy outlined in my last post, I have removed the several-hundred kB Lora font files from dynode, and opted to use Times New Roman, a far more well-supported font, in its place. Likewise, for the reasons outlined therein, I have moved all images not directly embedded in any pages to off-site IPFS objects, to which their older links have been redirected. Collectively, this has allowed me to shave ~1/3 of dynode’s total size. To that end, I’ve been considering even stripping styling elements entirely.
In future, minor technical updates of this character will be left to a changelog, rather than an entire news post.
04/04/2023, 21:27I have reformed dynode as a static HTML object that is now compiled within pandoc rather than MDwiki (more on that here), and added FAQ and Alt-tech pages. Owing to the culmination of a long series of technical mishaps with a curious run-in with a certain Arkansas police department, I decided to keep my Web presence fairly minimal for most of 2021 - thus, this update has been published far later than intended.
In addition, my last GPG key pair appears to be expired or something, and I have had to generate another to sign this and future updates to dynode. While I do understand that this is precisely the kind of security faux pas that tools like GPG had intended specifically to avoid, I do promise I will lrn2 key management by the time the next expiration comes around in 2 years. As I still control my Twitter, Keybase, and Namecheap DNS, you will in the mean time have to take my word I am indeed still alive.
05/06/2020, 19:06The experiments in keeping dynode running without actually hosting anything are ever-ongoing. After Freedom Registry, the .tk registrar, chose to hijack my domain and attempted to sell it back, I decided to go with a company that was worth a damn, and so I will be testing out “dynode.io”, which I registered with Namecheap’s ‘PremiumDNS’ model. So far, it has allowed me a surprising amount of versatility, despite still lacking any actual server to run. In addition to catch-all email forwarding and a number of subdomain redirections, I have 2 DNS entries one may use to load the site. The first being a URL mask for Cloudflare’s gateway hosting the IPFS object of dynode’s MDwiki files, and the second being a DNSLink entry for the same object. What this means is there are now 3 ways to access the site: the standard ‘dynode.io’ HTTP address, the DNSLink (IPNS) via gateways like ipfs.io, or via a node that is already running the IPFS daemon (which a browser also running an app like IPFS Companion will redirect to by default when loading the standard ‘dynode.io’ domain). Though the URL masking method does not allow one to hotlink any particular page on the site, the DNSLink methods do. When loaded via the ipfs.io gateway, Disqus commenting on the About page also seems to work more readily, and I am now looking more into Gab’s Dissenter browser for an even wider commenting ability. SSL certificates can’t be used for the main domain, so while the masking serves files obtained via Cloudflare’s HTTPS, the site’s object address itself could be captured (and the content therein easily inferred) from those inspecting the traffic through browsers simply accessing “dynode.io” via HTTP. Loading via an IPFS node encrypts all connections by default, so no certificates are needed in the other cases. So in essence, Cloudflare and the rest of the web are still providing me with bulletproof, world-class hosting and all I am paying for is the domain.
28/04/2019, 11:40The site files are now being pinned by Pinata.cloud, to speed up resolution and stop the site from being deleted every time the caches of the public gateways clear. Pinning services, especially free ones, create a great potential for the ability of user indexing to start proliferating content as quickly as HTTP services. More on this later.
22/09/2018, 17:51To hasten the loading speed of the site, dynode.tk is being pointed directly to an IPFS object, rather than my peer ID. Right now, the IPNS speeds are just too poor for me to rely on.
23/08/2018, 15:07I’ve learned I could probably speed up the loading of this site by lowering the amount of IPFS peers required to verify the content. Unfortunately, this is something that needs to be done gateway-side, and I am not running the gateway that dynode.tk points to.