How Uncommon Solid came to be

The site lives at 4167360.xyz, and it is called Uncommon Solid. Neither of those names was the result of a branding exercise. They are the leftovers of older, unrelated decisions that happened to collide on a Cloudflare domain configuration page.

Here is how a 16-year-old laptop in my closet turned into the website you are reading.

The closet server

It started because I wanted to see if my old 2010 MacBook Pro still worked. It did, but macOS on that machine has been an archaeological artifact for a decade. So I wiped it, installed Debian Linux, and set up CasaOS to handle docker containers and a basic home NAS.

Now it is a quiet, surprisingly reliable homelab node running a handful of services:

• Jellyfin for local media.
• CUPS to keep an ancient printer on life support.
• Hermes agent for running autonomous routines.

Initially, I used Netbird for remote access. It worked fine, but installing a client on every device just to check on a download or print a PDF felt like too much friction. I wanted to access my home setup directly from a browser, which meant setting up a Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnel to route homelab.4167360.xyz into my local network.

But to set up a tunnel, you need a domain name.

$0.85 per year

I did not want to spend twenty dollars a year on a joke domain for a laptop in a closet. While digging through registrars, I found out that numeric .xyz domains between 6 and 9 digits are designated as “Class-C” and bypass standard pricing entirely. They cost $0.85 per year, and the renewal rate is locked at the same price.

So I needed a number. I used 4167360, which was my old QQ ID from years ago. It is long enough to qualify for the cheap tier, and short enough that I still have it memorized.

Once the domain was registered and the Zero Trust tunnel was live, Cloudflare’s dashboard did what modern SaaS dashboards do: it suggested I build something on the root domain.

The accidental website

The prompt suggested deploying a Cloudflare Worker, and the first template it offered was for the Astro framework. A co-worker had used Astro for their own blog and mentioned it was incredibly fast, so I decided to see what the workflow was like.

I wanted a static output, content collections managed in markdown, and absolutely zero client-side JavaScript. I also wanted to style the whole thing with plain CSS—no utility libraries or preprocessors, just a single stylesheet with standard variables and simple layouts.

The name, “Uncommon Solid,” was auto-generated by Xbox Live when I created an account years ago. I never bothered to change it, it became my standard online handle, and now it is the title of the site.

The current loop

The deployment loop is about as simple as it gets. I write these logs in markdown files, check them into a feature branch to make sure the local build compiles, and merge them into main. A Cloudflare Worker automatically builds the static dist and hosts it globally.

Eventually, this site will probably turn into a habit tracker or a launchpad for other small scripts running on the home server. But for now, it is just a fast, dark-themed page that refuses to load a single line of JavaScript. And it costs me eighty-five cents a year.