what is this about?

i love blinkies so much! but, it can be a little hard to find some, and if the site theyre hosted on goes down, youre sol!!! so, i wanna make a website as a personal repository of all the blinkies, stamps, badges, icons, etc. that i could ever want!

architecture

now, does architecture matter much? no! but i dont care, im sharing anyways. im using pure html/css for the front facing stuff. for a reverse proxy, im choosing nginx (oldie but a goody!) and finally, for hosting, im going with digitalocean!

locating

now, didnt i just say it was hard to find blinkies? yes! combing through websites just for things i like is.. annoying… and time consuming! it took me about 90 minutes to find everything to make sure im happy with the blinkies i got. so! heres the websites i got mine from:

• coco's pixel safari
• adrian's blinkie collection

learning nginx

well, ive never used nginx before, but i thought nows as good a time as any to get it installed and learn to use it!
so, on my pc, i went to install it, and i got a 404 error from pacman! no worries though, in arch that usually just means that the package database is out of sync, so i just had to do sudo pacman -Syu to get it back in sync yeah?
oh god, i had about a thousand out of date packages! using kde really is a bitch sometimes huh? anyways, whatever i updated without reading too thoroughly.
im sure many of you can see where this is going.

so, i lost the blinkies i spent a while looking for, and any unsaved data! yes i do know that i could chroot into the os to try to recover them, but that is a lot of work, especially since i have disc encryption, and its annoying as hell to try to decrypt it. so, im using my laptop now.
anyways! back to nginx.

i symlinked the blinkies folder on my computer to /var/www/blinky/, and served it from nginx using some fairly simple code:
and i opened up the site, excited to see it work! and… i got a 403 error? no worries, i probably forgot to allow execution and reading, so ofc i just did the lovely chmod -R 755 /var/www/ command, and now the permissions were right! oh.. but it still gives me a 403? weird, not sure what’s happening. so, i made the most minimal version, where i only serve the files, without any indexing. still didn’t work? how weird! and i couldnt find any info online about why i was getting this error, so i struggled for a while trying to fix it!!

and im sure any nginx hardcore fan could see this coming from a mile away, but im a little stupid! so i couldnt find it for a while.

but, eventually, i had the thought, what if the symlink is the issue? and so, after changing it to an actual folder, it worked! thinking back, im sure a hardlink would work as well, but whatever!

setting up nginx for the index page and for stamps, buttons, badges, etc was basically the same, so ill skip out on explaining it.

html and web dev

now for something im fairly familiar with!
i didnt feel like making a real outline / wireframe of the site, but in my mind i knew what i wanted. i wanted a very simple grid of blinkies, with the file name underneath, where if you click on one, itll take you to a new window with only the blinky.


now, ofc since this is unstyled, it looks like shit!
also whats especially embarrassing, is that i accidentally used fig not figure as a tag… oops! but whatever fixed that and now it basically looks the same. worst part about this is that its displayed in block, which sucks ASS! so, whatever, i did some magic little css, and boom! it looks slightly less like shit!

hosting

now time for some unexplored territory for me, web hosting!
i first bought the domain lucialist.me from namecheap, which was an annoying ass setup and their site sucks! but whatever.

next, i tried to find a place to serve it and host stuff! it took a loooong ass time to find a company i was actually fine with using, and eventually, decided on digitalocean!
so i signed up, and obviously i did get a little charge for verification… but why did it have to be $13.98?? thats crazy for verification!!

anyways, i setup ssh and the domain, and boom! the site is live! well… almost!
see, i didnt have ssl setup quite yet, so i can only use the http protocol, which isnt… ideal in todays day n age. so! now it was time for the ordeal of setting up ssl and making sure it works with nginx, which was super annoying! but, eventually i did manage to get it to work, and, the site is done!

closing

well, thanks for reading about my adventures with getting my website up and running! this was a really fun learning experience, and its useful too! here are some little examples from the website:
i still gotta get stamps and badges on the server, but im fairly happy with how its been going!

you can check it out here!