Looking back at linkblog.io (2020/11/26)

2020-11-26 13:30:00:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith

I recently announced the end of linkblog.io. I go into a bit of detail in this short indie hackers discussion thread. I wanted to do a quick retrospective to have something to refer to in future.

I’ve been running a linkblog for close to 10 years. In a lot of ways all the links I’ve posted chronicle my web development journey, but also just life in general. I found it a very useful tool and still do to this day. Somewhere along the way I decided to build a linkblogging SaaS product.

These were the high level goals of the system that emerged over time:

Robust implemenation that does what it was designed to do and does it well
Have a minimalist user interface, emphasis on text content
Easily scalable to handle growth
Deployable to standard VPS hosting
Fault tolerant and able to have zero downtime deploys
Resilient so that any server could be easily rebuilt from scratch using backups where necessary

From a technical standpoint I achieved all of these goals.

I wrote about Robust NodeJS Architectures earlier in the month, and this describes very closely what the linkblog.io infrastructure looked like.

Some other application level features and capabilities that are worth mentioning:

MongoDB sessions support
Redis sessions support
Rate limiting using Redis
JWT API authentication
API Caching using Redis
Backend job scheduling using Agenda
Backend message queues using MongoDB
Custom domains
SCA compliant billing system (Stripe + webhooks)
Production and staging environments

Implemented using bash scripts:

Repeatable server provisioning system
Application build and deploy system
Backup and restore of certificates and databases
Log file backup and cleanup
Certificate renewal

Most of these features were added as a necessity in response to real world events that happened during development.

Though the UI is quite minimalist and mostly text based, there was quite a lot going on underneath. The system could have been quite easily and safely extended.

Finally here are some screenshots of the UI:

Landing Page - Header