I like my blog, but writing blogs ia a slightly tedious process. I like to refine my thoughts and edit my thoughts and only post about completeled projects here. But I also want to write stuff on the side, which is how the idea of microblog came to me. And since I got my new phone, I wanted to focus on photography, so I started photoblog as well.
Microblogs are not a new idea. Twitter, mastodon, bluesky are all microblogs. But I don't like using those platforms (I probably should), because I would probably end up scrolling more than I use it, so I built a single user platform to document my thoughts, projects updates and other random stuff.
In terms of architecture, I wanted to go static only, have 0 cost associated with it. But then updating/adding entries would need to me build and deploy the new website which is effort. Initial solution I had was to use a r2 bucket with images and use a JSON there as my storage. Public access would be read only. And I would have a personal service which could update the JSON. But it felt like an effort to manage the JSON and cloudflare has a very generous free tier for their serverless database. So I just used that. And I can get away with free workers also. If I start incurring charges, then I might consider going to JSON side. But that's it.
Photoblog also use a very similar architecture. What was interesting there is that my phone uses HEIF formats which isn't directly support by browsers. So instead of converting it server side and increase my billing, all conversion is happening client side on-device. Parallel processing and parallel uploads was also useful as individual uploads were pretty slow. I also compute a a thumbnail kind of image on the device and then upload it to the cloud, save even more server processing time.
Interesting projects, I used LLMs to build the frontend, and some of the backend, got some experience with node and JS, next/react/vite etc (I still don't know what they mean, but eh). I can code enough js/ts to get by. And knowledge of good programming patterns is very useful, because only the syntax changes, the logic remains the same.