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Elena Rossini

https://elenarossini.com/2025/07/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-211-cdn-edition/

My dear federated WordPress blog,

Sorry for all the tests I put you through in the last 48 hours.

First, I changed your Webfinger setup, which broke federation. Then I reverted back those changes… I posted a test message that immediately federated (yay) but when I replied to it from my Mastodon account, I set off the infamous Mastodon stampede: 5000+ requests in the span of seconds, which took you offline (ouch). I had to delete my reply on Mastodon, flush your cache, and you were back online (yay).

Ever since, I have been on a mission to safeguard you against the Mastodon Hug of Death – a very familiar phenomenon that I experienced with my self-hosted Ghost blog.

The solution I found for it (on Ghost) was installing Varnish Cache. And my oh my has it been effective! A real champion, even at times when my blog posts trended all day on Mastodon (like the one announcing the release of my Fediverse promo video).

But I’m digressing.

My dear WordPress blog, you need protection against sudden surges of traffic brought on by the Fediverse.

This morning, I tried it all:

  1. My plan A was setting up Cloudflare for you. I am SO GLAD that didn’t work out, though, because in the past year I have developed a real distaste for all things Big Tech and I couldn’t really reconcile using Cloudflare as your Content Delivery Network. Why this didn’t work out? It’s a very convoluted explanation… it had to do with DNS records and the way it’s set up. Basically if I manually connected Cloudflare to some DNS records for elenarossini.com, this association would take over ALL DNS records from the POV of my hosting provider, including subdomains… even if I didn’t add them. And I have LOTS of subdomains linked to self-hosted instances for Fediverse software and did not want to do that. I’m probably explaining things badly, but suffice it to say, it wasn’t ideal to tinker with DNS for a variety of reasons. Moving on.
  2. My plan B was exploring how to set up Varnish cache for this website by using shell access. That, unfortunately, is impossible: Varnish needs Nginx or Apache and on a shared hosting plan you simply cannot tinker with that stuff. What to do?
  3. My plan C was setting up BunnyCDN for this site. I first heard about it via the superb website European Alternatives (basically, a database of alternatives to Big Tech platforms and services from the US). Bunny is based in Slovenia and I heard praises of it. Now, I had tried to use it for Ghost earlier this spring, but never managed to complete its setup, and opted for Varnish instead. I decided to give it another go. Guess what? Bunny didn’t ask me for DNS records – its setup was easy and instantaneous, with its native WordPress plugin. I connected it to my Bunny account and was good to go – no tinkering with DNS.

I have double-checked in Developer mode that this site’s images are already going through Bunny. All good!

Disclaimer: unlike Cloudflare, Bunny doesn’t offer a free plan, so I will need to monitor costs. But I’m curious to see how it will do and how much it will cost on a monthly basis. Of course, I will report back about this (at the moment I have $50 in free credits).

Now the real test will be hitting “publish” on this blog post… and replying to the federated post with my Mastodon account. This simple action took my site offline yesterday.

If the site doesn’t go offline, I would up the ante and actually share the link to this blog post from my Mastodon account (to an audience of 8000+ people on hundreds of different servers).

Wish me luck!!!

Elena

Elena Rossini · My adventures in self-hosting: day 211 (CDN edition) — Elena Rossini
More from Elena Rossini
#BunnyCDN#CDN#Cloudflare
getmisch

Study in mice finds certain gut microbes can attack long-chain PFAs (take longer to dispel naturally), taking them out of your body. "Among the most common and dangerous long chains are Pfoa and Pfna, which the microbes expelled at rates of up to 58% and 74%, respectively." Study in humans next. It can take decades for the body to fully expel PFAs naturally. #Forever #Chemicals #PFAs #no #side #effects #gut #microbes #long #short #chain #expel #micro #plastics theguardian.com/environment/20

The Guardian · Some gut microbes can absorb and help expel ‘forever chemicals’ from the body, research showsBy Tom Perkins
Elena Rossini

https://elenarossini.com/2025/07/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-203/

Hello Fedi friends!

I’m currently experimenting with the POSSE method of publishing (“Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”) on my federated WordPress site (this one) so that I can more easily organize posts and retrieve them in the future. This is the first of such posts.

I have created a “micro” post category and edited the functions.php file of my WordPress blog to exclude such posts from the main blog.

Here is the code I’m using:

function exclude_category( $query ) {
if ( $query->is_home() && $query->is_main_query() ) {
$query->set( ‘cat’, ‘-2132’ );
}
}
add_action( ‘pre_get_posts’, ‘exclude_category’ );

Where -2132 is the number assigned to the category “micro”.

You can find the category number by hovering over it in the Categories menu.

I also plan to tweak my site’s navigation menu to make “micro” appear under the blog category.

At some point in the future that will replace the “blog”… otherwise it’s too confusing to follow how many blogs I actually have.

I am also debating whether to migrate my GoToSocial account to WordPress using the MOVE function. What’s holding me back for now? I will need to be able to implement Serdy’s blocklists here before I do that. I experienced some terrible trolling and abusive messages when I didn’t have blocklists in place on my GoToSocial account last month, so I learned my lesson.

And I’d like to see how “social” the Friends for WordPress plugin by Alex Kirk is, before I consolidate my two accounts.

Anyway, this is all really exciting, made possible by the magic of #ActivityPub and the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin by @pfefferle. Thank you Matthias!

Onwards and upwards!

#MySoCalledSudoLife

Elena Rossini · My adventures in self-hosting: day 203 — Elena Rossini
More from Elena Rossini
#micro#selfhosting
Replied in thread
RossS

@BleepingComputer FFS...can they get the fing file manager up to snuff first pls? Still the same damn thing as in win3! And really...notepad? This is a course from #Micro$oft on how to fuck things up really badly...only more so...

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The Krononaut Moon Project 🌑

 
Fungi Cosmology

❛❛ #Artists, #scientists, #curators, #anthropologists, #chefs, carrying out cross-sectional, #feminist, #Queer and #biocentric research, as wide as the micellar #network formed by #fungi, who inspired us to establish a connection between #Brazil, #Chile & #Switzerland and stimulating to open up to the #micro #world. ❜❜

🔗 vimeo.com/837074976 2023 Jun 16 | 4-min.
🔗 LabVerde.com/fungi-cosmology

VimeoFungi CosmologyBy LABVERDE
#Community#TimeTravel#Research
Nuki Raccoon: "A Sneaky Fucker"

Just wanted to show y'all I'm doing my #human #biology #research before I write things, and since I'm going into #micro / #macro #TF stuff with the #HardScifi of #Modders, I need to know what natural biology is actually capable of in order to build a plausible explanation...

...so I'm finding out how short or tall a human can be without issues.

The height for "Dwarfism" is under 1.5 meters (5 ft), though I don't think that's very short. Simone Biles is well under that. Poking around, I'm seeing people saying 1.25 m (4 ft), so let's say that's a good start.

The record holder for shortest woman is Jyoti Amge, a 31 year old indian actress who is 62.8 cm (2 ft) tall, and the record holder for shortest man was Chandra Dangi, a Nepalese weaver who lived to 75, at 54.6 cm (1 ft 9in) tall. He could walk and survived 75 years, so I assume there was no life-threatening complication, which would mean a human only needs to be about half a meter tall to be "healthy"...

(Continued in thread)

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