The Tech Behind My Blog

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Problems I needed the blog to solve

Before building the blog, I had a few requirements:

Pick a simple, general-purpose blog framework — and one that looks good.
Full feature set: comments, etc.
Bullet-proof against attacks, especially DDoS.
Optimized for mainland-China network conditions — fast access from inside China too.
No ICP filing — even though there’s no problematic content, I just don’t want the hassle.

Full breakdown of the tech

The blog framework is Hugo (Go), with a sharp-looking theme. The site is fully hosted on GitHub Pages; the backend is a GitHub Codespace where I write remotely with VS Code. GitHub Actions auto-deploys on push, so a new post is live in about 10 seconds. On Cloudflare I bought 10 years of baohongjiang.com and pointed it at GitHub Pages. Visit baohongjiang.com and you’re at the blog. Everything is HTTPS-encrypted end to end. Traffic analytics use Google Analytics and Cloudflare in parallel, so I have accurate visitor metrics. Comments are managed via Disqus — for well-known reasons, comments are not visible or postable from inside mainland China.

At this point the blog is full-featured and fast. The site is essentially static, so backend attacks aren’t a thing. And because the site is hosted on GitHub Pages and proxied through Cloudflare, a DDoS attack would have to first break Cloudflare and then take down GitHub before it could even touch my blog. Roughly speaking, you’d need tens of terabits per second to be able to hurt me. I kind of wish my blog were big enough to be worth that kind of attack. Haha.

Now, for well-known reasons, although mainland China can reach the site fine and the speed is OK, latency is over 200ms and packet loss is bad. So I had to specifically optimize for mainland China. Cloudflare does have geo load-balancing, but it’s enterprise-only and expensive. So I bought baohongjiang.cn, ran a bunch of tests, and picked the best Hong Kong GIA-line VPS I could find for nginx reverse-proxying. When you visit baohongjiang.cn, you’re really hitting the GIA-line VPS, which then fetches my site. Latency from mainland Chinese ISPs drops to around 30ms with very low packet loss. It flies.

The full request path: user → baohongjiang.cn → Hong Kong VPS → baohongjiang.com → Cloudflare → GitHub Pages (origin)

baohongjiang.com is the rock-solid international entry point. baohongjiang.cn is the mainland-China fast lane.

This setup is not the cheapest possible — straight GitHub Pages costs you nothing. But I just wanted to flex.

Blog Tech on Hongjiang Bao's Blog

The Tech Behind My Blog

Problems I needed the blog to solve

Full breakdown of the tech