Hello, kelog

This is the first post on kelog. Before writing about anything else, it seems right to write down how the site itself works, because it took a few detours to get here.

The short version#

The whole site is a folder of static HTML files, served by nginx on an ordinary Ubuntu desktop at home. Nothing on the router is port-forwarded. Instead, the machine keeps an outbound connection open to Cloudflare, and visitors reach it through that.

visitor
   │  HTTPS
   ▼
Cloudflare edge
   │  outbound tunnel (QUIC)
   ▼
cloudflared on this machine
   │
   ▼
nginx :80  →  static files

Why a tunnel#

A home connection makes hosting awkward in two ways:

• NAT. The machine has a private address behind the router, so the internet can't reach it directly.
• Blocked ports. Many home ISPs block incoming traffic on ports 80 and 443 anyway.

A tunnel sidesteps both. cloudflared dials out to Cloudflare, which is always allowed, and Cloudflare sends requests for kelog.org back down that connection. As a bonus, HTTPS certificates are handled at Cloudflare's edge.

How posts get written#

Posts are plain Markdown files with a few lines of front matter:

---
title: Hello, kelog
tags: [meta, self-hosting]
---

The post body goes here.

A small Python script turns them into HTML pages, a tag index, and an RSS feed. Saving a file rebuilds the site automatically, so publishing is just writing.

That's the setup. Everything after this post is about something else.