Building bsimg.net: Project Log
Benjamin Sanders | 18 September 2026 | project, image host, portfolio
I need some projects to work on and write about here. So, this past week I got the idea to stand up a Debian 13 VM and try creating my own CDN of sorts to host images and other assets for this website.
Starting Point
This idea was inspired by X/Twitter’s pbs.twing.com, a dedicated image-serving subdomain separate from the main site, with on-the-fly size/format selection via query parameters (?format=jpg&name=large).
While I don’t currently have on-the-fly size/format selection yet. I do currently upload three different image sizes for an image which are thumb, medium, and large.
I did rely heavily on Claude to “vibe code” this but my reason for wanting to write this article is to go over the project so I can cement what I did in my memory.
Standing Up The Server
I configured a Debian 13 server on a dedicated server I use for most services I host and a spare IP address. The plan being to have the domain I recently bought for this project bsimg.net be the apex domain since it was available, surprisingly. Then I’d configure pbs.bsimg.net as a used in the images and pbs.atl.bsimg.net as a region-specific name for the box itself. I’m hoping to to later add more boxes in other regions so configuring this now future proofs for sure.
The Upload Workflow
The workflow seems like it could be fairly easy when I’m working on an article or just this site in general.
If I need to upload an image I just use the following command in my terminal on my Mac that uses a BASH script to upload a screenshot or image.
bash-upload Screenshot\ 2026-09-18\ at\ 06.48.44.png
That image file was the original name of Figure 1 and it hashed the name on upload. I’ll probably put that script up on my cgit instance later.
Next Steps
Now that I have one node configured for this service. My plans are to copy the config files and try putting them on another node in another region.
Final Thoughts
That’ll will be it for this post but I do plan to write on this site more often as I work on projects. Hopefully somebody else finds my musings useful.
~Ben