Cotton Coder
It’s finally happened! My bookmark blog is back!
The curated bookmark blog of web dev curiosities
Cotton Coder is launching as a small project with large ambitions. It starts life as my new bookmark blog. A blog I’ve been meaning to revive for a very long time. I used to curate a blog called Design Heroes that I permanently archived 12 years go.
This new blog is all about:
- Web design
- Web development
- Web technology
I think you see the pattern. If you read my blog here at dbushell.com I’m sure you’ll find something useful on cottoncoder.com.
Tech Stack
Cotton Coder is built with Deno and Svelte using my experimental DinoSsr framework, another of my new projects for 2024. At least for now. I can migrate to SvelteKit easily if I need something more mature.
The blog is backed by a Deno KV database. I’ve implemented GitHub OAuth login to protect the content editing routes and API endpoints. The source is available on GitHub if you’re curious.
Self-Hosted
I was planning to host Cotton Coder on Deno Deploy. Unfortunately right now the isolate cold start times are pretty rough. There is an open GitHub issue. Even the most basic “Hello World” example suffers. So it’s not just my bad code! I’ve been using Deno Deploy for things like IoT web hooks and small “edge” function tasks. Those work great. But a website response being delayed by seconds is a performance killer.
Solution: I’m self-hosting for now!
The website lives inside Docker containers, in a Proxmox virtual machine, on a firewalled VLAN, proxied by a Cloudflare tunnel. This saves me from pointing DNS to my public IP and opening port 443 on my router. It should be secure. I’ll find out quickly if it’s not!
What’s Next
Cotton Coder is not replacing my blog here. I’ve never used this blog for bookmarks anyway. I’ll be publishing to both sites. Over my Christmas break I had a lot of ideas for what Cotton Coder could be. We’ll see what bears fruit. Launching this month was important otherwise the site would sit in a private code repo forever.
Get yourself over to 👉 cottoncoder.com!
