Welcome to my epic website. Not sure how you got here, and there's nothing here, so go away now I guess.
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Ok I decided to add something, just to vent even though I'm too lazy to write some CSS (evil black magic) for this page. Did you know that setting up a blog is actually not easy? Maybe it would've been easier if I just went with Apache2 and just installed Wordpress. But like, just for a small blog? And god I don't want to have to deal with any more damn databases. So here I go looking for other solutions, but they're all either niche or designed to work seemlessly with some serverless hosting service like Netlify or something. Guess what? This is a god damn low-end VPS, running behind Cloudflare. As it turns out, absolutely no one expected someone to want to be able to build a static website on the VPS it's going to be hosted on; instead they expect you to use a Github repo or something. This is especially the case for the content management systems. All of them seem to just offer some cloud service or locally hosted tool to interact with a GitHub repo. Guess I'm actually just the odd one here wanting a CMS that runs on my VPS that I can remotely access from anywhere, not having to rely on anyone else's cloud service, to be able to build a static website for my Nginx instance so I don't have to enable PHP or work around all the caching fuckery that's sure to occur with a dynamic website behind a Cloudflare instance. Though, thinking about it now, it's not like enough people are actually going to visit this site to make caching some thing that's even going to happen at all. Perhaps I should just settle for the reverse proxy alone and just set up Wordpress or some other bloat.
Given how simple this page is as I write this, you may notice the Free DNS link at the bottom of the page. I remember a long while ago, when I was a young teen who was even more cheap than I am now, I hosted my website behind a .tk domain name. The thing about .tk and all the other trash FreeNom had was that they only allowed single year renewals, which makes sense I suppose, given the domains are free and all. But the shitty thing is, the moment the domain expires, the domain turns into straight up adware. Funny story, I was dumb enough to use an invisible 1x1 iframe to a page hosted on this site as a way to do some sort of analytics for a Chrome extension I had written, being the dumb kid I was. This was a popular extension at the time, and when that domain expired, thousands of people got redirected to some adware. As for how the adware was able to hijack the host page from within an iframe? I have no idea. I can only chalk it down to some browser security failure from that time.
Ok, I'm rambling now. Point is, FreeNom domains sucked when they existed, and now they don't exist at all. I assume they shut down once scammers started exploiting them hard. Good riddance. Meanwhile I wanted to make this little website, but I wanted it far seperated from my real identity, which of course means not using the neat little .pro domain I was able to pick up for my personal website and email. Being the NEET that I currently am, I could hardly fathom spending even a few dollars for a cheap domain name. So instead I remembered my very very first website domain, a subdomain of progr.am, which sadly isn't available anymore, from Free DNS. So I thought, ok, same thing, right? Just use something like visualnovel.moe, easy peasy. Problem: Cloudflare. I host this website on the same VPS that I host my main website on, and again, I do not want this site associated with it, (I shouldn't be telling people this, shouldn't I). Thing about Cloudflare, they don't let you use subdomains. Woe is me, dreamhana.visualnovel.moe will never exist. Still being too cheap to buy a domain that'll renew at like $9 a year, even if the first year is like $1, I considered maybe something like .ovh which seems to be only $3 or something. But then, in a moment of desperation, I remembered the guy who would become my saviour. As I was doing my research into Cloudflare not working with my subdomain, I came across this community.cloudflare.com page. The guy mentioned .uk.to and .us.to being domains that would work with a subdomain on Cloudflare. So I tried it, and it worked! Thank you Free DNS for being the only good place to get a free and short subdomain, both now and when I needed it 10 years ago back in 2013 (god, I'm getting old).
Any typos are because I'm writing this in nano on my VPS via WSL SSH. [2023-03-18 05:53 UTC]
Free DNS