KikiGaki, an old homelab domain and a Japanese dictation website

Today let's talk a bit about the dictation website we built.

KikiGaki.

I bought the domain a long time ago. Around the middle of last August.

At first, the domain was not for a product

I did have a small backup/demo running on it. But at that time I was busy messing around with Homelab stuff to prepare for my portfolio, then exams and all kinds of random things came in. In the end, that domain was only used for my portfolio.

It still pointed to homelab.kikigaki.io.vn with gethomepage in the early days when I was just starting to stumble into homelab. More exactly, gethomepage was in part 3.

Those were the early days when I was still fumbling my way into this Homelab path. Later I moved everything over to thatnghiep.dev, but I still kept the old one as a memory. Because there were a few cases with it that were both funny and painful =))

There was a period when the web app was released without SEO. So whatever the homelab hosted, if you searched the exact phrase kikigaki, Google would automatically show a bunch of homelab websites. It almost listed most of my homelab series.

Great minds somehow met

By chance I met another guy, and he started talking about creating a Japanese dictation website. Coincidentally, I had enough resources to do it. So the two of us started talking, then started building together.

The website was released on Facebook for the first time on 16/04, so it has been a little over a month now.

After a while, I decided to move the whole domain to .vn instead of .io.vn, because I wanted to go long term with this website.

The SEO problem started showing up

One problem came up: I know basically nothing about SEO. Like, I am embarrassingly bad at it.

So yes, this post is partly for writing down the experience, and partly for creating one more backlink, hopefully a decent one, from my website to that side. A little more is still better than nothing.

But I still do not understand why, even after pointing quite a few links there, Ahrefs and other pure SEO tools still do not show any backlink. Maybe it just indexes slowly.

Two guys building KikiGaki

Back to the old story, this system was built by two guys.

One guy is me, handling SEO, infrastructure, and server-related things. The other guy handles everything from FE to BE, and even the models.

But this older bro likes playing with microservices. I am more on the monolith side.

Well, fine. Let him experience what microservices and distributed servers feel like. In the end, the bottleneck will probably be the 200Mbps network line anyway.

So I just let him experience it a bit.

And I vaguely gave him a few more servers.

The current web architecture

The current web architecture looks kind of interesting when drawn out, so I spent a bit of time drawing it.

Claude drew the first version terribly, but that was basically because my prompt lacked context. Letting AI draw everything from scratch is possible, but whatever, I only let it draft the skeleton, then I fixed the rest. It also helped me remember some Architecture stuff again.

This version is still not fully complete. But honestly, once I redrew it, I realized it is insanely messy.

The Auto review path is currently broken. I hope I can finish reporting all my course work soon, then come back and fix it. The issue is around KikiGaki Node 1.

If you are learning Japanese

Anyway, that is it for today.

If you need to practice dictation, shadowing, or Japanese flashcards, please support me here: https://kikigaki.vn