Show HN: A microblog hosted in DNS TXT records

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9507642

by erikano • 11 years ago

5 3 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Most recent post is pointed to by CNAME record:

    host head.microblog.erikano.net.

This will return a reply like:

    head.microblog.erikano.net is an alias for 1.microblog.erikano.net.

Read the post:

    host -t txt 1.microblog.erikano.net.

jayrox• 11 years ago

that's cool but what are you using to create these on the go?

stevekemp• 11 years ago

You could do worse than use my git-based DNS host, which uses amazon's route53 on the back-end.

But anything scriptable would work.

erikano• 11 years ago

It is currently a manual process.

This first entry I made by

    TZ=UTC echo $( date +%YT%T%z ). <message>

Which I copied to my clipboard and then manually created the TXT record for and then the CNAME.

Next time I want to add an entry, I will:

    expr $( host head.microblog.erikano.net \
            | egrep -o '[^ ]*$' | cut -d'.' -f1 ) + 1

To get the ID for the post to be made and then echo calling date as I did for the first post.

Had I still been hosting the DNS server myself, I would've turned this into a script and appended the entry as a TXT record directly and updated the CNAME to the new value using sed.

Actually, thank you for asking because I just realized what my next little project should be: Instead of the way I'm doing it now, I can selfhost a little DNS server which will be authorative over microblog.erikano.net while still hosting the DNS for the rest of erikano.net and my other domains where I have them now. The project will be written in Go since I have been wanting to make something in Go but didn't finish the other things I started writing in Go. I have no ETA for the microblog DNS selfhost server project because of work and current projects.

Hope I didn't misunderstand the question but if I did and you meant how to update the microblog when I'm out and about, the answer is I would need to use a web browser currently to manually update the records. When my own server has been written, I simply ssh to my VPS which hosts the server and run a cli tool I will name "mb" ("microblog") with my message as argument.

Show HN: A microblog hosted in DNS TXT records

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