I ripped out a dependency and then I found out what it did. I wrote an RSS parser for a very simple project, and then figured, how hard could it be to use in a real feed reader? Well, not very hard, but it was somewhat time consuming, and offers another perspective on using other people’s code.
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Not just a new server, a news server, although ironically I think only the olds use the news now. It was really just an experiment in why not. It took me about three hours from opening a blank main.go to mostly done, which was good to cover the Becket joins Dr. Cuddy at the FBI arc on Castle. Then an afternoon faffing about making scripts to load up some content.
The first and most important thing to discuss is the name, nuset. It’s got all the same pheromones as Usenet, subliminally exerting mind control over the reader. In the local dialect, it’s pronounced more like newsd, rhymes with used, as if it’s used news. About right. I was thinking of telling people it’s named after the Assyrian god of information, and could probably get someone to believe that. Or maybe it’s nu-Set, the reincarnation of Set.
The NNTP protocol is specified by RFC 3977. It’s a pretty easy read, and filled with lots of examples, which I found very helpful. Read a section, then copy the client line into the parser and copy the server line into the output. There’s words, too, but it’s much less ambiguous to always see exactly the format of commands and results.
In hindsight, this would have been a good project to experiment with a new language. But I was lazy and already know where go keeps the textproto.DotWriter.
I’m not super into Gemini, the tiny web alike, in part because I think it’s fun to interact with people. But a tiny usenet, without all the spams and trolls, I could get into. Although I’m not there yet. I’ve only got enough commands working to allow local posting, not federation. A little more effort, and we could get there, though.
For now, I’m just mirroring content. You can check it out at nntp://flak.tedunangst.com. Subscriber exclusive: see the behind the scenes markdown I use to write posts!
It’s the internet, so there’s crawlers, and it’s the future, so they’re mindless wannabe chatbot scrapers, and it’s the cyberpunk world we always dreamed of, so the cool thing to do is to write your own force field to keep the bots out. Which I did.
For background, I have not actually noticed any load from bot scrapers (other than the google go cache, different story), but found them a different way. There’s a bug in humungus which I’m too lazy to fix that causes it to 500 error whenever a file revision that doesn’t exist is requested. There’s a second bug I’m too lazy to even look for that generates these links for the bots to find. But the punchline is I have a bunch of 500 errors in my log file. The robots file excludes these URLs because I know they’re useless for a crawler. I’m trying to help you, stupid bot, but some bots are beyond help, so we need a bigger hammer. Initially, I banned netblocks in pf, and after eliminating all of BabaWei’s IP blocks, we’re down to Brazilian ISPs, which I don’t want block at the network level.
anticrawl is a simple go http handler. Stick it in the affected service. Then configure a regex because I like problems. I don’t care if you scrape my README 700 times, that’s what it’s for, but leave the other junk alone. Also, I’d rather not bother humans, even a little bit, until they start clicking around deeper.
The challenge is super easy. If you have javascript, you have to find some 42s. (Why is it always zeroes we’re forced to search for?) If you don’t, you have to solve the riddle of the llama. Either way, it’s super trivial because the adversary isn’t exactly basilisk class AI. I was told cookies are evil, so the state is just stored server side. I’m thinking I might change the design so it’s even easier to bypass by starting at a normal entry point. So far, it appears very effective.
There’s also a standalone proxy server for people who can never run enough servers.
The Honk Foundation is pleased to announce the initial release of Enterprise Social, previously known as Honk Enterprise, previously known as honk3. It’s reworked and retuned, reimagined and remade. A social network for the future.
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I added ActivityPub support to humungus using the vocabulary defined by ForgeFed so now I can follow my commits with honk. Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
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Another month of poking around trying to make an almost useful terminal emulator.
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I wrote my own terminal and you won’t believe what happened next. I called it vertigo.
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It’s been four years since honk 0.1. Before that, the preview, and shortly after the followup. But finally, after a long journey, we’ve reached honk 1.0. (Narrator: honk is a microblog server that federates with other servers via ActivityPub.)
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Reddit is deddit. Everybody needs to write a replacement. Mine is called azorius.
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