introduction #
So today i had a normal school day but i decided to perform a few small tasks on the web blog. I decided to add a changelog file to the website you can visit by going to blog.309electronics.net/changelog/ where i will write all small tasks i do. It can be anything from fixing up spelling mistakes and or re-writing stuff so it reads a lot nicer and has proper grammar, or it could be related to backend stuff.
Added a Cangelog #
So i added a changelog file and fixed some spelling, but i am not done with that yet. I also added a DNS record for status.309electronics.net just so i dont have to do that later, but i dont have any plans for the statuspage yet or am not working on it for now. Also partially because i am focussed mostly on school/study stuff as i do want to pass this semester. So for now you will see the page below (which is also one thing i made today).
Added an Nginx landingpage for sites i own that i have not yet setup. #
The page above i made by reusing the template of the 503 page and editing some text/html and that be it. So yes the 503 down_page is also simply an HTML file i myself wrote/created and i reused that for some other pages as i like the style and its the style i went with for a majority of the backend. Also i changed the webmaster email so instead of targeting my personal email, it targets the alias i created in my mailbox.org account, also a lot more profesional as then i can have my own domain as having 309electronics.net is better and nicer than gmail.com. Also this nginx landingpage is usefull if i have sites that dont yet have the 503-page fallback logic, so you wont get a bright blank boring ‘Welcome to NGINX!’ page if i take down those sites/services.
Improved the Client-side HTML on the comment and subscription systems. #
So i also made it so the client-side code for the comment system or subscription system was a bit more nicer for the users end. Now i made it so if the comments-API is offline that it does not show the comment box and shows you some text, informing that the comments are not available at the moment. See below picture. And because the remark42 system itself loads the assets on the page, i did not have to make those dissapear/prevent them from being rendered, although that is the case with the subscription service down below.
Also i wanted a similar Error message thing for the subscription service. When the subscription server would be offline we also want to make sure it does not render the subscription input box as that would be useless and might give users false hope/leave them clueless as when they put in their data, it would simply error out due to the backend being offline. Thats also just bad UX (User Experience). First i tried with regular API calls to kind of probe to see if the backend listmonk API is alive but i would chase rabbit holes as i got CORS (Cross origin) related errors and it would simply not work. Then i cam eup with the genius idea of looking to see if it can fetch the favicon from the server to see if its up. Normally if listmonk is alive it would, just like any other website/service, show a small icon and have that stored at some place. In the sense of listmonk its simply in https://{yourlistmonk_instance}/admin/static/favicon.png.
And when the server would be offline, that path ofcourse also dissapears, so that could be a good check to see if the listmonk service itself is up. Also because i deployed the nginx status page so you cant use regular old http status codes as i setup that custom nginx landing page and thta would laod and give a http 200 code and that obviously means that it can load something and that would not be a good check.
So actually the reason i wanted those was because yesterday evening and today in the morning/middle of the day, i had some issues with my mailbox.org mail provider. Listmonk and the comment systems stopped working due to them not being able to send emails from my mailbox account. When i tried directly sending emails from within mailbox i also could not send any outgoing emails from neither my default/personal account nor my aliases i setup. What was weird is that i could actually receive emails from outside so sending just seemed to be broken. So the listmonk and comment systems where never at fault but i took them down (simply disabled them in nginx proxy) so people would not use them and then i came up with the idea of making the UX better and to be more clearer.
The issue seems to be fixed but i did send support an email because i was curious why i could not send emails anymore and i did not get any notice from them why i could not send mails anymore. So for me its also still a mystery but i hope they respond tomorrow or somewhere this week as i am curious. It could be as simple as maintenance on their end (but then i would atlest expect a email telling me they will take the systems offline at xxxx-pm). Another possibility could be that i got ratelimited or temporarily flagged falsely for spamming as i did test the commment and listmonk systems a couple times and who knows, but when testing it i had no issues. But i hope to hear from them soon. But that did spark a good idea and i am happy i implemented a better UX.
But i do feel kinda bad as i broke my no-vibecoding rule where i would not use AI to generate code for me. But i was at school and i was in a busy place so i could not concentrate/think enough and also i did it in break-time so i also did not have much time but these will be the only vibecoded parts as i am highly against vibecoding as it takes no skill and nowadays people who only want to get money and use claude to code and create everything for them get hired earlier/more than the actual people who studied and do it with a passion. And it creates stupid lazy people who need to rely on AI to breath for them in the future and i hate seeing how someone can be soo useless/lazy, yet earn way more than actual skilled hard working people and i cant handle how they just brag about “Look, claude made me a million dollar bussiness. I dont see you much on Ibizza do you? Well, too bad you waste your life being busy and having studied for it”.
In my opinion, AI can be usefull as a tool but today most datacenters are built and water and electricity are wasted for crappy AI slop. Or for letting people vibecode or make soulless crappy AI art. If it was used for actual good things like cancer or other pathological research and actually used to improve the world, i would not be against it as much as i am now, but the disadvantages and slop simply outweight the advantages and beautifull things it can do. And it sucks how a lot of companies/governments invest millions into this bubble and thus raising prices on things like RAM, GPU’s, Storage and other items so consumers cant buy stuff at a normal price anymore and it really is a bubble as a lot of consumers are with me and dont want Ai shoved into every corner of the world, but sadly there are also a lot of people who blindly use/trust/follow them and use AI for things like vibecoding or making “art”.
End #
Anyways, sorry for the AI-rant but this is what i did today. So very small tasks but they do add/improve stuff. Statuspage is not yet planned, but i did already register the domain/address and i also added an nginx landingpage and i improved some html elements and added a changelog file. It might not be the best way to track changes of something but it is functional for now and i live by the motto: “if it works, dont touch it” which seems to work in a lot of cases and its true, why should you touch a system if its doing what you want it to do? Sure you cna make it better/optimise it but you could also break it in the process and spend (often large amounts of) time fixing it.
I do want to focus mostly on school this week but i will try and see if i can work on some things although i dont know what and i dont know how much energy i wil have left. Anyways most stuff will be in the evening after i done my homework and stuff for my study. MusicBox project is curently on halt as i stoped with it for now as it was kind of frustrating due to lacking a lot of documentation and some weird quirks/stuff, but i will pick that up somewhere this month/next month as it also just requires a lot of time (compiling, debugging, finding out how stuff works, going in the deepest holes on the internet just to find stuff) and i dont have a lot of time. So working on my blog and servers is a lot easier/smoother as i know how to do most stuff or can find a milion tutorials (or fall back to AI if i really have to).