My fork of PolarBearBlog

After made the decision of using PolarBearBlog as my new blog system, I immediately started to make some tweaks to my like, as this is in go, a language I’m quite familiar with (this is also one of the reasons I picked this system).

The first change I made was some Makefile improvements, as the old one doesn’t work with GNU make (it probably works with BSD make as that’s the one Mac uses), and there were a few bugs.

After that I added support for Cactus as the comment system. The old one only supports (optional) Disqus support, but there were a lot of privacy concerns around Disqus, and Cactus is something I’m interested in for a long time and this is my chance to finally try it out (and I’m liking it so far).

I created pull requests for those, but judging by the state of the upstream project I don’t really have my hope up for them to be accepted/merged, so I also created my fork for my instance. Besides the 2 changes mentioned above, some other noteworthy changes are:

• Render full html in RSS feed via CDATA, as I’m a big supporter of RSS/Atom feeds and I want my readers to be able to consume as much as possible in their feed reader of choice.
• Add option for alternative home, as I only use this instance for the blog itself and I have my homepage on another domain.
• Switch to distroless for the production container image base, this both reduces the image size from ~40MB to ~10MB, and also reduces the vulnerabilities from ~40 to 0.

The full changelog between my fork and upstream is here.