Causes of recent blog downtime

I don’t think anyone reads this blog. For that reason it is very ironic that I am justifying why its recent downtime. This downtime refers to both the lack of content but also literal server downtime. The reason for this downtime is partly business, partly motivation and partly technical. From most exciting to most boring…

Busy at work

I have started working as a robotics engineer at the company Turf Tank. They produce robots for painting sports fields such as american football fields, baseball fields and much more.

I have been working there since september 2023 which lines up exactly with my last post. A lot of the technical stuff I usually do is now directed at work, and due to the confidential nature of business, I cannot disclose the problems I face nor the solutions I come up with.

Believe me when I say that the scope of these problems and solutions are much greater than most of what I’ve been dealing with in my spare time. It is very exciting, quite challenging and a valuable learning experience.

Personal logistics

After graduating I was no longer eligible for student housing, so I had to move away from my studio apartment. The empty rooms of my new, and much larger, apartment made me uncomfortable, so I had to buy a lot of furniture. I also had to figure out transport and social security and a bazillion other things. Decision fatigue took a toll on me, causing me to neglect my blog and hobbies for a long time.

Rocky transition to Cloudflare

I used to host my blog on the free tier of the cloud computing company Netlify. This suits me perfectly - this site is static & simple, has few visitors and is therefore very low in bandwidth usage. Recent news broke showing some poor free tier user being sent a $104 000 bill for his static website. The bill was eventually wavered, but the incoherent response from the support team had me shaken to the point I deleted my site of their platform.

I switched to Cloudflare Pages, a platform very similar to Netlify provided by the network service company Cloudflare. They are the company using a wall of lava lamps to create encryption keys. I ran into some issues, and since I am not exactly a network engineer I could not decipher what was going on. I would load joulsen.dk and be shown an HTML site with all the assets missing, because they were linking to www.joulsen.dk¹.

When loading www.joulsen.dk I would be greeted with a 522: Connection timed out from the side of Cloudflare. Weird. The steps leading up to this was:

• I deleted my Netlify page
• I created a new Cloudflare page at joulsen.pages.dev
• I changed my domain name servers to Cloudflare’s. My domain name registrar is punktum.dk for the record.
• No DNS records could be detected, so I manually added a CNAME pointing joulsen.dk to joulsen.pages.dev and www.joulsen.dk pointing to joulsen.pages.dev.
• I enabled Full (strict) SSL encryption
• I scoured the internet for solutions

After some trial and error, I fixed the problem, and to the best of my knowledge this is why:

• I changed the CNAME record of www to point to joulsen.dk. I honestly don’t know if/why this is necessary.
• I changed the baseURL of my Hugo website to https://joulsen.dk causing all hyperlinks to link to the apex domain and never www. Because of the CNAME record pointing joulsen.dk to joulsen.pages.dev ² any link will point to the correct resource hosted by graciously Cloudflare.
• I added a static redirect matching (http.host eq "www.joulsen.dk") pointing to https://joulsen.dk. This of course broke all permalinks to my website beginning with www. So instead I made the redirect dynamic, instead pointing to concat("https://joulsen.dk", http.request.uri.path).

I am sure some nerds out there can explain why what I did is an unspeakable act, but this works.

What now?

The site works again, so you can look at the monk on the front page. This also means that my homepage is no longer a 522 Cloudflare error which is nice. I can’t and won’t guarantee any sort of timeline for content, so I cannot tell you when to expect the next post. Maybe 2025?