[2.0] A Realm Reborn: Post may contain potential spoilers.
Golden Lies
Look at this. Do you see any trees- No there’s absolutely zero of them. Just some cacti masqurading as servers or something. Heck the rewards you receive aren’t even gil. Such nonsense, this whole place is a scam. Although, I might just play one more minigame. Wait I can’t I still need to get back to the Black Shroud for some trees to chop.
Why only A Realm Reborn?
I figured that this might prompt some curiosity to those reading these posts. The main thought process behind why is fairly simple. I didn’t want to haphazardly showcase other expansions when people reading this may not have even heard of this game. Final Fantasy 14. Is a pretty old game. As such it has a lot of content and story built up over time. My overall plan is to progess through the expansions in order. A Realm Reborn is in my opinion the meatest in terms of zones and as such I intend to spend the majority of the time with it. Once I reach a satisfying point I will proceed with the next expansion and repeat till the latest expansion.
Once I have went through all of the expansions. I will probably start bouncing between all of them without much regards to reason. I’ll probably add some kind of side story like what I am doing now with this “tree arc”. Adding a little story will give me the foundation to work on what zone to go to next. Now its doubtful that there will be a story every single post, but I do intend to try to add something for each screenshot.
I actually been thinking of a little neat idea, but will require the recruitment of a lot of players (like 30-50)
Alternate methods of posting
I have spent some time last night determining on how I should make these posts and if there were easier methods to do so regardless of machine and location. I have devised a couple solutions. One of them I plan to implement along with this post and the other will require some work on the website itself.
Rclone
Its fairly self-explanatory. Rclone is fairly similar to that of rsync which allows the use of sync files between a client and remote server. The difference with rclone is that it allows you to sync with a cloud service like Google Drive with a local machine. Currently, I use plcoud as a cloud storage service and rclone supports it. As such the plan is very simple with this one. I setup a few folders that allow me to upload the necessary files for a post. The server hosting this website will frequently check for files on pcloud that are new. If there are new files it will copy them onto the server and tell hugo to build the content. Once completed the server will be updated with the new post.
Rclone will easily allow the uploading and posting of anything that I want regardless of where I am for aslong I have access to the internet in some form.
Direct upload via website
This solution involves me making a html page that will essentially allow me to directly upload the files necessary to post. The only challenge is understanding on how to accomplish that in a fairly secure fashion. I intend to wall it off with a username and password, but I also need to add an additional level of security in the event the password gets bypassed. I intend to implement a rather simple one time password solution (OTP). The file must have the proper “signature” in order for it to be posted on the website. If it doesn’t the file is rejected. After multiple attempts fail. The whole page will be deleted and greet users with a 404 error. I would then have to manually add the page back into the public directory in order to use it again.
To be quite honest, the latter solution might be a bit overkill, but I personally like to avoid using third party solutions. I want to implement both solutions so that I have multiple ways of posting in the event one of them doesn’t work. I still have my ansible solution that I might use as a backup. Although, its not easily translatable to other machines on varying OSes. I still have the conundrum that I am literally relying off of a live service game that can at anypoint go down and never to be seen again, so the whole not using third party solutions is kind’ve a moot point.
Some other website stuff
Galleries or Slideshows
Now I have been debating between implementing a gallery or slideshow solution for the high quality versions of the screenshots. The main problem is scalability. I am envisioning this blog to have hundreds of posts which means hundreds of images to display. Plus they aren’t gonna appear over night either. The source of the problem is having a page adapting to how many images I’m gonna display without some form of database.
All of the images are in one folder and I can probably orchestrate a solution similar to how the homepage adapts to new posts. Instead of posts I would just do it for images. A slight other problem is going to be load times. These images are going to be a few megabytes in size. Individually won’t cause too much of a problem, but displaying many at once can easily hurt load times. As such, I have to implement a scalable solution that also considers performance.
Regardless, I don’t plan on saying further on this subject until I get something tangible to present.
When are new posts going to be uploaded?
So… In regards to last night’s post. I had rather little time to make that post. As such I want to touch a little bit on when to expect these posts. Unfortunately, I won’t give an exact timeframe of when these posts will be uploaded, but I’ll try to shoot betwen 11am - 11pm PST. A rather huge timeframe sadly. The main reason for this is due to work time constraints. Typically, I work at 1pm and as such I try to get one posted before hand, but at times I can’t. Due to this I try to get home “quickly” and finish the post since something is better than nothing.
I am currently looking for better working hours, but I can’t guarantee anything. Atleast today and tomorrow I have the day off.
That’s all folks
Ever heard of Looney Toons? Pointless question. Anyhow, thats all there’s going to be for today. The funny thing is that I want to type more but if I continue on that trajectory. There will be nothing left for me to say tomorrow. Have a Good day/night.