NTN
It's Never The Network
I completed and launched the second iteration of NTN. NTNv2 features a new UI, backend and is centered around the blog. I started a new job back in December and when I started the job, I decided to take a short break from blogging. That eventually turned into a 6 month long break, but I'm very excited to be back.
Originally NTN was going to primarily be focused on the Network Troubleshooting utilities, but I've now decided that they should take a back seat to the content. I'm not going to get rid of the tools, but they are going to take a bit of a backseat.
As far as content goes, I really doubled down this week. I published an article on the Locator/ID Separation Protocol and with it I started a podcast titled "Never The Network - Audioblog". The audioblog is basically the article slightly rewritten to work as a podcast. In addition, I made a fairly basic youtube video so I was able to publish on YouTube as well. I'm also planning to experiment with screencasting.
I'm going to try writing at least two deep technical articles or screencasts a month and maybe some lighter content in between.
Since NTN Notes is now up I decided it was no longer appropriate for users to see the NTN Tools page first and then maybe end up in the notes section by accident. To deal with this I built a new homepage that shows the four newest articles, along with all the tools I've built so far.
In the process, I also did quite a bit of refactoring and made adjustments to the tools where javascript is no longer required to use them (although using it still provides the best UX). I believe this will also help out with SEO as you can render the pages with AJAX loads.
This evening I finished building out the Notes section of NTN, but I didn't have a ton of content, so I was going to wait to push this section to production. Just for the sake of getting it out there, I decided to go ahead and reuse some relevant blog posts that I wrote in the past. This should help with SEO and I believe that the Notes piece will be helpful to NTN Tools users in the future.
The site is still in beta and there is still a ton of work left to do, but this is an important step.
My intention with NTN Notes is to provide a few different categories of 'notes' relevant to Networking. Right now my plans are to write deep technical documents, short digestible cheatsheets and possibly some videos. After all, if I'm building a site that aids with troubleshooting, having a section detected to describing various network technologies makes sense. This section of the site will basically serve as a technical blog.
The fact that I've finally started writing code for this piece is a huge accomplishment by itself. I kicked around the idea of using ghost, or a CMS platform for this section, but since the site has been built on flask so far I decided to use the Flask-FlatPages module, which makes it pretty easy to render markdown on flask sites. This is actually easier than making a CMS or blog work with my current code base.
I'm actually nearing completion on this section, but I do want to get a few of the notes completed before I push this into production. I'm also doing quite a bit of refactoring as I go to make the site more modular. As I expand the number of tools the site has, I'd also like to add a paid monitoring section that uses the tools on the back-end. Having well organized code will definitely pay off as I start working on that piece.
In addition to NTN Notes, this week I:
Created a logo using Looka
Built a server to run goaccess from with a cron job to copy my web server's access logs and generate usage reports every 5 minutes
At this point I had the layout and enough tools written to make the site public. The product is far from complete as I still have several tools I'm working on as well as some non-tool features I'd like to add to the site. The site is currently hosted on a single digital ocean 1 cpu droplet, so a surge in traffic will likely take it offline.
I've had this idea in my head for a long time (I purchased the domain in 2017), but I never started working on it because I haven't been able to come up with a way to monetize it. At the end of June, I decided I'd just start working on it and see what I come up with along the way. By the end of the day I had the basic design of the website and the DNS and cURL tools working.
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