Lessons learned from 2 years of operating a tiny news archive

I began running Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive almost exactly two years ago, with a simple goal: Create a straightforward way for Finnish language learners to access the simple news broadcast by YYYY-MM-DD. It has basically accomplished that goal, with only a few tweaks here and there to keep everything running.

Earlier in the series: Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive. I stand by those points, and have some more to add here at the 24-month mark.

• Put what you want to see first! The only significant frontend change I made was reversing the ordering of the archive so that the latest material comes first; otherwise every single day we’ve been running is listed in YYYY/MM/DD order for one’s Ctrl+F pleasure. I made this change after realizing the modal use case was not to go on a binge of frankly boring news content, but just to have a faster loading page to read today’s or yesterday’s news as it came out.
• piCore is worth the learning curve. piCore is a fork of Tiny Core Linux which, unsurprisingly, runs on the Raspberry Pi. The big draw for me was that after an initial SD disk read, the SD disk is never touched again and everything - files, operating system, the whole caboose - runs in RAM. This is a technique I’ve only ever heard of Mullvad VPN using for their VPN servers before, but it turns out to be an excellent way to spare an SD card and make it last much longer - if you’re willing to put in the additional legwork of basically turning the Pi into a plug-and-play appliance that does its work as soon as you plug it into the wall.
• If you’re going to script for an external server, just do it in standard shell, please. The first iteration of this site used the Fish shell I know and love for interactive use. When I migrated from Debian to piCore for the backend it turned out (a) I couldn’t install this easily and (b) even if I could I would be wasting some of my precious 4 gigs of RAM, which I could use for something else instead. So I took my pile of shell scripts and rewrote them into one behemoth POSIX shell instead that occasionally shells out to inline Perl 5 instead of Python for the harder stuff. This took a lot of work but the end result is much easier for me to tweak and maintain as time goes on.
• A website does not have to be dynamic to be useful. Besides my nonstandard choice of programming language, I have to admit I’ve been very pleased wth the tech stack I’ve stuck with otherwise. Hugo is still my favorite tool for creating fast static websites from the ground up; I ate the one-time cost of actually figuring out what all of its files and variables did years ago, and to this day I’m still finding good uses for that. A website which periodically updates but is otherwise static is a really valuable point in design space for things like this; I’ve never had to pay a cent in hosting costs because at the end of the day it’s just a lightly-prettified stack of HTML files.

If you want to see my other software projects for helping people learn Finnish, you can find them all at https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/. Most things there are free, with the exception of an optional Pro license for a pocket dictionary which gives you reverse lemmatization features (the dictionary works as a dictionary no matter what).