Dave's log

When that day comes, this is where it will be at. A standalone outpost that relies entirely on its own in-server resources can be relatively simple and quite easy to deploy and maintain. What you can use is a lightweight, minimalist blogging software called WriteFreely, running on a Linux server (of course, what else?)

It’s principally a text-only – or at least certainly ‘text-centric’ – tool that can be run comfortably within 1 Gigabyte of memory, and that includes running a mail server to allow post-by-email publishing, as well as all the usual ‘must-have’ services (notably a Web proxy server like Apache, Nginx, or Caddy).

The database that a WriteFreely blogging website needs is provided by a simple and robust SQLite flat-file database. Because the content that the database is storing is text-only, it’s actually quite compact in size and beginner-easy to back up.

WriteFreely is running happily on a small 10-Gigabyte filesystem, and just a few Gigabytes of space gives you the possibility of quite a huge library of blog posts.

With even a single virtual CPU, page-serving performance is good, certainly if you’re running a fairly low-traffic blog. A host like that can idle at almost-zero processing level and just 30% memory occupation.

Yet another advantage of a text-only blog is that it consumes much less network bandwidth – it’s efficient and about as green as you can get.

The simplicity of WriteFreely’s post editor interface makes it an absolute boon for focusing and writing without distraction.

It’s likely to be robust and able to withstand any unexpected big demand for pages. That does presume that there’s actually anybody who wants to read the garbage, sorry, content that you publish.

There is also the easy-to-do option of proxying your site through Cloudflare if you are getting hostile dynamic denial-of-service attention.

Fail2ban provides some pretty-efficient security and abuse handling, and should be a de facto choice for every Linux self-hoster, in addition to any other protective means you might use.

Fail2ban is another one of those great Linux tools that works well while using quite little CPU time.

One wise and simple precaution regarding memory management is to make sure you set up a swapfile, to ensure that application services eating too far into the modest 1 Gigabyte of memory are less likely to cause system errors and logjams.

With 1 Gigabyte of memory, it’s worth devoting 2 Gigabytes of your 10-Gigabyte filesystem to a generously-sized swapfile. It will really increase your server’s resilience when traffic spikes.

And, of course, you’ll be wanting to properly configure your firewall.

Neither should you forget to rotate your login password (preferably passphrase) on a regular basis.

On a micro-server of this size (1 GB RAM; 10 GB filesystem; 1 vCPU), you can’t implement TOTP (Timed One-Time Passwords) for multifactor authentication. Anyway, WriteFreely doesn’t support it out-of-the-box in version 0.17.1.

So the reliance on password-only login without MFA can be seen as a weakness.

You could implement multifactor authentication using a self-hosted auth system or an external provider’s service, but then it wouldn’t be internal and autonomous.

However, you can mitigate those shortcomings with Fail2ban and a jail that monitors throttles and generates bans for abusive login attempts. You can easily augment that with region discrimination through GeoIP and a Maxmind database, using location filtering in your web proxy server.

My opinion is that WriteFreely is a very good tool that has actually fueled my creativity. It’s so easy and distraction-free to use. I do enjoy writing with it.

That’s good, because I need to start writing. This is a time in which communication is needed about some burning subjects – important issues relating to our society and its technologies, our natural environment, indeed our very survival.

This is where it’s shields-up time, guys.

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