WinonaRyder

I got tired of fighting SSR and implementing the same optimizations over and over again so decided to launch http://oya.to/ an optimizing cloud proxy - kinda like Cloudflare. The main feature right now is prerendering as an alternative to SSR, but there are a lot of things planned for 2020.

In a similar vein I found myself doing a lot of work that I think should be unnecessary just because I wanted to buy some fonts and not depend on yet another subscription service so decided to build https://woff.cc/ aka "Web of Fonts". It's currently in the planning stage but when launched, it will allow you to upload your licensed or (SIL) free fronts (including all Google fonts already built in), optimize them (subsets, css embedding, etc.) and either host it there for free or download and host it yourself.

I too recommend prerendering as a general solution to the problem. You already have to implement it such that it works in the browser, so why add complexity with SSR, switching frameworks or worse: adding another framework/language/CMS just for the landing page?

I use a DIY DNS server as opposed to Pi-hole specifically, but I found that doing that broken sites at the most awkward times.

Imagine doing something on a site and then suddenly the it breaks... you realize why and maybe unblock something and refresh the page only to find out that you now need to enter a phone number (which Google won't accept, no matter what you do), because of your suspicious activity (looking at you Twitter, Paypal, YouTube).

Anyway... for the last several years I've worked around this by using multiple browsers and/profiles:

- Tor Browser for my usual HN, Reddit, YouTube lurking... stuff I don't need to log in for.

- One with almost no blocking (apart from the incognito mode) for banking, PayPal, etc.

- One for dev work... you get the idea.

I've gone down this road and think for most users prerendering is a better approach.

Switching to a static site framework or SSR usually means throwing away your existing processes only to be tied into a limited framework that most likely doesn't work with all the tools you already use or want to start using.

Just search for SSR on the issue trackers of some your dependencies to see what I mean - just recently a React Beta/RC broken NextJS sites...

The right approach( as we see it is to stick a prerendering and maybe a CDN in front of your site and call it a day.

Shameless self-promotion:*

I/we run oyato cloud (beta), a proxy service (à la Cloudflare) that does prerending, etc. It's per page so you can e.g. code your site in React, but have only the landing page statically rendered e.g. https://oya.to/

Demo of a Google Lighthouse simulation of the Product Hunt homepage:

- https://oya.to/demo/ph-demo.png

- or edited demo video https://oya.to/demo/ph-demo.mp4

Live demo of a statically rendered version of HN:

- https://hackernews.oya.to/

- or its onion address http://5kaps5io3job5ayhb2o2riiuw6trcavvdeluq4wfnga27j6zrr3k4...

I'm here!

IIRC I started on a Knoppix live CD and over the next year or so I hopped around Mandrake, Ubuntu, Gentoo[1], Red Hat, etc. mostly coming back to Mandrake... and then I found Arch and fell in love with its simplicity and speed.

Around the time of GNOME 3 and KDE 4 I went looking for a new DE and found Unity to be the best and most polished - even to this day it's better than anything I've used before or since - which meant I had to use Ubuntu for a while, but eventually the Debian-isms and instability got to me and I went back home to my Arch.

BTW, I use Arch Linux... on servers and have found it to be very stable, simple and pain-free esp. when compared to Debian and Ubuntu.

[1]: https://funroll-loops.oya.to/

Yesterday we had a great thread about tools for detecting captive portals; today one about getting your IP address.

Anyway... not quite the same as this, but we have one that also supports responding with a non-200 status if a field doesn't match e.g. `curl --fail https://whoami.oya.to/tor-exit=true,ip=192.168.1.2`.

https://whoami.oya.to/about

> For me, Go has become the new Ruby. A language I use to get things done, and enjoy programming again.

Despite my annoyance with the direction that Go's taken since 1.10, this line really resonates with me.

TL;DR

Windows + PHP + slow laptop drove me to put away my childish anti-Google fears for a weekend and try Go, and for the first time since I started coding (with Pascal) I enjoyed programming.

Cool story:

Around late 2010, after a few years of using (btw, Arch) Linux exclusively, I was given a slow Windows laptop for work. The laptop came with Windows Vista IIRC and the whole experience of writing PHP code on an unfamiliar OS combined with a slow laptop was just misery - it was even worse than my memories of Windows ME/XP.

I tried everything to get a familiar Linux env going: Cygwin, msys, KDE... and it just added insult to injury.

Anyway, soon after, it was Go's birthday so it was in the news again and one weekend I decided to put away my childish anti-Google fears and try it and I never looked back.

Something about the simplicity, its lack of CMake, Makefiles, latest build-system-of-the-week, dynamic linking hell, C++ complexity, D and its 2 std libs, etc. was a breath of fresh air.

Before even falling in love the the concurrency primitives, I started writing "bash scripts" in Go - something I do to this day. I even started writing prototypes in Go to then port them to PHP and Python because I could write the inefficient, naive, brute-force code to validate an idea... and it'd still end up being faster and use less memory than the code the was deployed to production.

I later also discovered that my shitty naive linters written in Go that parsed and checked whole PHP packages every time I saved a file ran near instantly compared to the heavy disk-destroying IDE indexing - it was crazy.