Cotton Coder
Cotton Coder ź“ė Ø
Update for 10 Jul 2024
Alas life is busy and plans for Cotton Coder are on the back burner. I may have been a little too excited launching it! Iām publishing a new microblog here at dbushell.com.
Itās finally happened! My bookmark blog is back!
š Cotton Coder is live!
The curated bookmark blog of web dev curiosities
Cotton Coder is launching as a small project with large ambitions. It starts life as my new bookmark blog. A blog Iāve been meaning to revive for a very long time. I used to curate a blog called Design Heroes that I permanently archived 12 years go.
This new blog is all about:
- Web design
- Web development
- Web technology
I think you see the pattern. If you read my blog here at dbushell.com Iām sure youāll find something useful on Cotton Coder.
Tech Stack
Cotton Coder is built with Deno and Svelte using my experimental dbushell/dinossr framework, another of my new projects for 2024. At least for now. I can migrate to SvelteKit easily if I need something more mature.
The blog is backed by a denoland/denokv database. Iāve implemented GitHub OAuth login to protect the content editing routes and API endpoints. The source is available (dbushell/cottoncoder.com) on GitHub if youāre curious.
Self-Hosted
I was planning to host Cotton Coder on Deno Deploy. Unfortunately right now the isolate cold start times are pretty rough. There is an open GitHub issue (denoland/deploy_feedback). Even the most basic āHello Worldā example suffers. So itās not just my bad code! Iāve been using Deno Deploy for things like IoT web hooks and small āedgeā function tasks. Those work great. But a website response being delayed by seconds is a performance killer.
Solution: Iām self-hosting for now!
The website lives inside Docker containers, in a Proxmox virtual machine, on a firewalled VLAN, proxied by a Cloudflare tunnel. This saves me from pointing DNS to my public IP and opening port 443 on my router. It should be secure. Iāll find out quickly if itās not!
Whatās Next
Cotton Coder is not replacing my blog here. Iāve never used this blog for bookmarks anyway. Iāll be publishing to both sites. Over my Christmas break I had a lot of ideas for what Cotton Coder could be. Weāll see what bears fruit. Launching this month was important otherwise the site would sit in a private code repo forever.
