Show HN: A text-only blog engine using Cloudflare workers and KV store
53 comments
·October 26, 2024jagadeeshposni
pyeri
Minimal mistakes is a great theme. I had almost decided on minimal mistakes when I wanted to upgrade my blog from a simple two column Hyde theme. But then I wrote the template from scratch using bootstrap-5 as I felt that gave me more control and I took it as opportunity to develop my frontend skills. Here is my blog:
LtdJorge
Same happened to me with Astro. Yes, it’s much more involved initially because you have to set up the entire layout, but after that, adding content only pages is just writing Markdown. And for the layout, with the help of Tailwind and TailwindUI, it’s pretty easy for a non-designer.
simonw
I tried this out and found it useful for exploring Cloudflare workers. One thing I learned: KV and durable objects are not the same thing. KV is eventually consistent, durable objects is the thing where all traffic has to be routed to the same node since it's dealing with a read/write store that has read-after-write guarantees.
Also Cloudflare KV provides a simple dashboard interface for adding and removing KV entries: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1e072d04960616970381a433bfca7...
nbbaier
Thought this was really cool, so I reimplemented[0] it in Val Town[1] using their blob storage[2]. Mine's a bit longer because of I got a little more elaborate but it was a fun exercise.
simonw
6 comments already complaining that this isn't "simple".
I suggest we instead treat this post as if the title was "Show HN: a simple text blog demonstrating how to use Cloudflare workers and KV store" - that way we get to have a more interesting conversation.
dang
Thanks—we've put that (more or less) in the title above.
(Submitted title was 'Show HN: Simple Text Blog")
jonutah
Sorry and thanks for fixing. I'd put more detail in the description but didn't realise it didn't show. Thanks for making the title more accurate.
Xeoncross
I'm honestly not sure what the problem with "simple" is either.
It's literally a single file with 80 lines of code. At this point the only thing easier is a linux one-liner to serve a file directory over HTTP.
Like, has anyone ever used Jekyll, Hugo, Ghost, Jr, Wordpress or any other blog system? None of them are anything close to 80 lines of code.
null
jumping_frog
I think what would be amazing is if WhatsApp creates a mobile number based website which anyone can access if they know the mobile number. Access through whatsapp mobile app.
bravura
That's called a Telegram bot and you can write one yourself.
eggfriedrice
This is nice, apart from a quick play when they were new I've never really looked at CF Workers and KV again. This made me go and have a look at the docs and find that it's actually looks quite useful. I didn't know they'd added Python and other languages, so that's cool in itself.
I like Jon's example here, a single and fairly short file that does just enough to demo this all, nice.
freetonik
I'm building a blog directory/reader/search engine [1] on Cloudflare Workers with D1 as the main database. Very pleased with the ecosystem, including Queues and scheduled jobs. DB migrations are simple, local development is a breeze (scheduled jobs don't work though, but there's a simple workaround), and the DB is an SQLite implementation. I am worried about vendor lock in, but as long as I keep the app relatively straight-forward, it shouldn't be a huge deal to migrate to some other Node or Deno backend.
Super_Jambo
I'd have thought the SQLite database (D1) would be a more obvious fit for a blog?
jonutah
Good point, I'm making my way through exploring more of CF so I'll likely try a D1 variant of this. Ta
Super_Jambo
I have been very impressed with what you can build on it.
I built this little service to add UK specific political location data to Action Network CRM. 300 lines for the actual service!
code here: https://github.com/jms301/ANUpdaterUK/blob/main/src/index.js
Sure it's only taking a webhook, reading an API, looking up a db entry and then updating via API.
But just knowing it's running on someone else's infra and there's so little code to validate is very comforting.
Prior to this I had a version running on a VPS and yeah I can do it. But you end up with a LOT of code / config to run the web server, the queue, the database... And any of that could be introducing bugs and security problems.
bravura
I was stoked on D1 when it was announced.
But the maximum DB size is 10GB (https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits/).
Really?
Super_Jambo
I assume the intention is you store actual data in R2 objects and just hold references to them in D1.
freetonik
Note that you can create up to 50,000 databases.
ThinkBeat
What is the pricing structure on this?
I am sure there is a free-tier, but if we skip that and pretend we are paying for it from the beginning.
How would much 100.000 hits be?
I presume it would be a tiny number, A esp given the current content in the blog. so lets imagine some photos and heavier content.
How difficult would it be to extend with with CF CDN?
LtdJorge
For workers, free is 100k hits per day and 10ms of CPU per hit. KV is 100k reads, 1k writes, 1k deletes, 1k lists and 1GB storage.
The subscription is 5 USD a month, including 10M hits at 30ms each, 10M w, 1M r, 1M d, 1M l, and also 1GB.
One of the examples in their page (for a fully dynamic website, which is worst case) is: Subscription $5.00
Requests $1.50 (15,000,000 requests - 10,000,000 included requests) / 1,000,000 * $0.30
CPU time $1.50 ((7 ms per request * 15,000,000) - 30,000,000 included CPU ms) / 1,000,000 * $0.02
Total $8.00
sigio
I'll stick my static website on a $3.50 VPS then, and have no practical limits and a fixed price. Also soo much simpler.
stavros
This is great, thanks! It's always useful to see these "here's how to do something useful with a new technology" demos, and I've been wondering how Cloudflare's offerings work exactly, so thanks!
Now we need the equivalent thing for Durable Objects! Maybe a chat room, hm.
hk1337
I like it but not that enthusiastic about JavaScript echoing html. What about having simple html templates that call back to the worker for the posts and the worker return json?
freetonik
So, have some JavaScript on the client side just to retrieve text and put onto the page? Seems like unnecessary complexity.
jonutah
Yeah it is gross interweaving html fragments randomly but I wanted to see if I could do it and keep it all constrained to one file. Thanks for the feedback.
Turboblack
it's far from simple, because you need to use several technologies at once, why not do it so that you can just copy it to the hosting and it will work right away? especially since it's a microblog
bigs
Sounds interesting
convolution8
[dead]
I have been working on something similar this morning. I want to create a simple blog to document my thoughts without having to deal much about technical stuff and maintenance and spend a few hours diving the rabbit hole of jekyll blogs.
While their documentation(https://jekyllrb.com/docs/) is one of the best resources to learn, I have found my job much more straightforward using one of the pre-built themes that is available on the internet. With deployment to github pages almost instantaneous, I can see myself updating the blog much more often.
The blog which I am currently working on: https://jagadeeshposni.github.io The theme I have used: minimal mistakes