Sustainability Reflections for My Website's Development

Aug 6 2024 personal 6 minutes read (About 923 words)

Related thoughts and Actions on sustainable development of the website

If you just want to know why some pages on the website are encrypted, please jump directly to the section “Article Encryption”.

Background

Recently, I discovered a website that completely replicated my own site and even outranked me in search engine rankings. Clearly, this website plagiarized my work:

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This behavior reminded me of the predicament faced by individual developers:

If your output content is free: it’s likely to be stolen by some groups and become a tool for others’ profit, whether it’s code or articles.
If your output content is paid: then your users may complain about paid content, paywalls, or related ads, leading to the loss of many users.

There is no perfect solution to this problem; relying solely on passion cannot drive high-efficiency production or lack continuity. On the other hand, if you don’t open-source, you won’t be able to attract more like-minded people.
This world requires a balance; I think as an individual developer in the open-source world, maintaining sustainability is most important, so I’ve initially thought out a balancing approach that suits my own situation.

My Thoughts

I’ve shared in previous articles that my purpose of writing is to feel a sense of growth and progress, and small gains can form positive feedback, thereby accelerating this process. Currently, I obtain positive feedback through writing on Medium.

Writing on Medium, where I post articles behind a paywall, user interactions such as reading, liking, etc., can bring me small earnings. Although these earnings are relatively modest, they indeed represent a very good positive feedback mechanism, because here is a platform with millions of users willing to pay for reading. As time passes, my article will eventually benefit some people.

However, writing on Medium also has its drawbacks. When I share my paid Medium articles through free links, many people will still mock and ridicule me, thinking that sharing technical content should not be paid. This idea has some logic, as each person has their own choices, and I don’t want to lose this part of the audience.

So, is there a way to cater to paying users while also retaining hope for free users?

After researching, I found one possible approach: make the latest article visible only to paying users initially, with free users seeing it later as time passes and more content is produced.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:

Suitable for technical writing. Various programming technologies share similar underlying ideas, so releasing them early or late won’t have a significant time-sensitive difference. It’s not like news hotspots, where if the news isn’t “new”, it means audiences won’t be willing to buy in.
Retain some free users. Many people feel repelled by Medium articles at first, and I think it’s because they initially form an emotional response before reading the article deeply. Older articles shared through website free links can avoid this emotional response.
Increase website traffic. When your articles are freely readable, you’ll be more willing to share articles that you think might benefit others, and these users will also be more likely to read and interact with you.

Disadvantages:

Balancing means not being thorough. If you want to cater to both paying and free users, it may lead to some people from each group feeling resentful. For example, those who dislike paid content might discover that your latest two articles require payment, leading them to feel annoyed because they dislike marketing tactics. These people may eventually understand you as their life philosophy changes, or they may never understand, as most people’s joys and sorrows don’t always align with each other.

Action && Implementation Process

Connecting to Cloudflare

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Originally, my website was a single-layer SSL/TLS, as shown above.

To avoid crawlers and malicious requests, I connected to Cloudflare, which now has two layers:

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Here’s a brief summary of Cloudflare’s pros and cons, which are widely shared online:

Guaranteed security: I can protect specific resources on Cloudflare and identify whether requests are from humans or non-malicious crawlers. These basic features are available for free accounts.
Convenient maintenance and management: I can view request information, including user、IP source and so on.

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Disadvantages:
- Additional encryption methods, which may not be necessary from a certain perspective.
- Some countries or regions may experience higher latency when accessing my website.

Security is an ongoing battle between offense and defense. To achieve greater security, you must sacrifice something. My website now has basic security guarantees, which are sufficient for me at this stage.

Article Encryption

Using robinmoisson/staticrypt to encrypt HTML pages and automating the process with a GitHub Action:

- name: Encrypted file
 run: |
   path1=$(grep -o '<a href="/[^"]*"' ./public/index.html | grep -v '#more' | sed 's/<a href="\([^"]*\)"/\1/' | sed -n '4p'| sed 's|^/||; s|/$||')
   path2=$(grep -o '<a href="/[^"]*"' ./public/index.html | grep -v '#more' | sed 's/<a href="\([^"]*\)"/\1/' | sed -n '5p'| sed 's|^/||; s|/$||')
   link1=$(npx staticrypt "./public/$path1/index.html" -p "${{ vars.STATICRYPT_PASSWORD }}" --share "https://programmerscareer.com/$path1/")
   link2=$(npx staticrypt "./public/$path2/index.html" -p "${{ vars.STATICRYPT_PASSWORD }}" --share "https://programmerscareer.com/$path2/")
   echo $link1
   echo $link2
   npx staticrypt "./public/$path1/index.html" -p "${{ vars.STATICRYPT_PASSWORD }}" --template-instructions "Why can't read it now, reason here: [https://programmerscareer.com/opensource-thinking/]"  -r -d "./public/$path1"
   npx staticrypt "./public/$path2/index.html" -p "${{ vars.STATICRYPT_PASSWORD }}" --short --template-instructions "Why can't read it now, reason here: [https://programmerscareer.com/opensource-thinking/]"  -r -d "./public/$path2"

The current article passwords are:

1	#staticrypt_pwd=5f77eb18a6c18446fe6411fad44920c6d7abcd8d43047260e811a6c71fb59a5b

To access an article, add this to the URL, for example:

1	https://programmerscareer.com/golang-syncOnce/

You need to input the password to access. For example:

1	https://programmerscareer.com/golang-syncOnce/#staticrypt_pwd=5f77eb18a6c18446fe6411fad44920c6d7abcd8d43047260e811a6c71fb59a5b

You can automatically enter the page.

The password can be changed by modifying the salt value or the GitHub Action’s STATICRYPT_PASSWORD variable.

However, I do not plan to change the password for now.

Top priority

My previous articles mentioned that the first two contents of my static website will be automatically locked, while Medium’s article content remains unchanged. However, I plan to initially close Google ads on the website.

Why am I closing Google ads?

I am worried about Google Chrome manifest version 3
Google is continuously narrowing people’s choices, as ad blocking extension slowly limited and ordinary users cannot block browser ads. Meanwhile, website maintainers are unable to control what ads will be displayed on the site, which will all be controlled by Google. Bad ads may potentially affect ordinary people, inducing them to make irrational decisions.

In summary, I made some minor changes to the website during this period, and I believe these changes will benefit me and others in exchanging ideas, helping me recognize more friends, and accelerating my learning of English and personal growth.

Of course, I understand what is most important: continuous persistence and writing. Just like a stream, persistence in writing is the source of the stream, while various optimization measures are like better riverbeds. Good riverbeds can make the stream flow farther, but this will always be secondary; what’s most important is to maintain the source of the stream forever flowing.

Continue striving, happy coding, and happy writing.

中文文章: https://programmerscareer.com/zh-cn/opensource-thinking/
Author: Medium,LinkedIn,Twitter
Note: Originally written at https://programmerscareer.com/opensource-thinking/ at 2024-10-06 18:09.
Copyright: BY-NC-ND 3.0