What actually is iBaguette.com?

What actually is the iBaguette website for, and what can you find on it?

I've owned and developed iBaguette for over 3 years now and there hasn't been any good post or information explaining exactly what happens on the site, so read below for a summary and history of the site! I hope at least some of it is interesting for someone out there.

Summary: where is iBaguette today?

iBaguette.com is a UK-based website and service that is open-source, privacy-centric, and designed to help improve various aspects of your life. It provides a wealth of resources and tools to make things a little bit easier, and is dedicated to creating a better experience for its users! iBaguette is the home for a huge wealth of resources, including:

• well-used, popular and unique GCSE and A level revision cheat sheets which are proven to work, increasing users' grades significantly.
• coding challenges
• even more revision resources for subjects like French vocabulary, geography, biology, and sciences.
• quick links and a platform to discover other well-reputed revision resources which are regularly audited and refined, including maths, physics and chemistry.
• open-source development guidance, available on the Computer Science cheatsheets
• NEW! Games development projects, currently my Unity project for my Computer Science A level, called "Advanced Water Tech Demo".
• several fun and active Minecraft servers, with custom terrain modifications like Terralith and datapacks, including Nullscape and Incendium.
• an open-source desktop application called DraggieTools which allows anyone to have a range of options to interface with specific files and modify settings which may not otherwise be possible, among a list of other things (check the GitHub repo to learn more)  
• a technical blog, where I post some niche yet extremely useful things that I wish I'd have known much earlier!
• a public API for developers for projects hosted using iBaguette services including Advanced Water Tech Demo, DraggieTools, 
• two popular open-source Discord Bots such as BaguetteBot and Cuisine Bot, as well as services available to buy your own custom bot. 
• information about my YouTube Channel, including polls and information regarding the latest video uploads.

All of of which is built by me, Draggie (albeit with a few template structures!), and open-sourced for transparency.

You can join the Baguette Brigaders Discord server to talk with me, other developers, enthusiasts, students revising and the entire community! Feel free to talk with others, make new friends or ask any question you may have. You'll be sure to get a response in no time! 

The site's history

Starting out

The first website on iBaguette.com was created using Blogger. At the time, I did not really have a clear vision for the website's future and used it mostly as a learning opportunity, and served as a playground for me to experiment with various tech skills, including using Cloudflare for domain management. The old website is still accessible in an archive form at old.ibaguette.com. It was not until later that I began to develop a clearer idea of what iBaguette could be, and started to put more effort into building the website's content and features.

Summer 2021

The site stayed fairly barebones until early 2021 when I took it completely down to work on its code in detail, and also to prepare for the future. On the 10th August 2021, the site came out of maintenance with a completely redesigned look and feel. This allowed me to create more content, with more of a purpose. Unfortunately most of the UGC (user-generated content) from before the upgrade was lost, but this was low-quality anyway and is much better deleted than being around today. The original post mentioning the changes after downtime is still available here!

This update paved the way for me to be able to publish content relating to my main Discord bot, BaguetteBot, as well as the latest content on my YouTube Channel. With new tags, a new layout and better compatibility for mobile devices, on top of Cloudflare's enhanced security and extreme performance uplifts, this version is still used as the core of the website today.

From summer to the turn of 2022

From Summer 2021 to Spring 2022, not much changed on the site. This period was the most active the site had ever been, with new posts and an ever increasing number of visits, although not much was updated in terms of the interface. This was in the lead up to GCSE exams, so I did not have much time to do development of the website. 

This period of time saw the explosive growth of the Discord server, with over 400 people joining it from the vanity URL that we had, discord.gg/baguette. Unfortunately this is not the link any more (which is discord.gg/GfetCXH) as other servers had taken it, being a fairly desirable link (as well as being costly to keep!) but did provide us with a large, continually growing community for around 6 months. Although some members have left since then, we are healthily above what we started out as.

That being said, there were significant updates to BaguetteBot and the bot that helps out our Discord server, Baguette Brigaders Helper, to keep up with this rapid growth and the annoyances that come with it. Statistics for Brigaders Helper became visible on one of the site's subdomains, brigaders-stats.ibaguette.com, pulled directly from the bot which runs 24/7 on Replit's servers and is written in pure Python, with the web interface being a Flask application.

Exam season, 2022

Exam season May and June, and to help me with revision, I created "cheat sheets" to recap all of the essential information for different subjects and their respective papers, including physical and human Geography, theory and coding Computer Science and other sciences like Biology. I would typically finish each one a few days before, or the literal night before, an exam. 

From there, I would quickly export the cheat sheet into a styled HTML document with a TOC (table of contents) using StackEdit, an in-browser Markdown editor. Within a matter of moments, I'd see an instant spike in website traffic from friends and classmates discovering the update and sending it on to yet more people.

I built a quick page with buttons on to allow people to navigate thorugh the cheat sheets I made in a few hours one night. After GCSE exam season was over, I revamped this to include GCSE, A level, be open-sourced, and show the full range of all my subjects that I had created content for.

And after that...

After I had taken a well-earned break from those exams, I made a small update to the site's look and feel to where it is today. I also revamped again the cheatsheets page, as well as creating more YouTube content due to unexpected growth and demand, all content of which was published on the site. I also began to create A level Cheat Sheets for ORC Geography and Computer Science, as well as creating more generalised revision resources and tips, which educators and teachers began to use. And that's where we are today, with even more content in the pipeline which I can't wait to create!

Résumé

Despite our "humble beginnings" of sorts, iBaguette.com has since grown into a fully-fledged and well-developed website and service, offering a plentiful range of resources and tools for free to anyone who decides to use it. Our commitment to open-source and privacy-centric principles has attracted a loyal following, and its dedication to making life easier for our users continue to be a driving force behind my development of it.

Some website statistics

iBaguette, according to this Cloudflare Radar analysis at the time of writing, is in the top 200,000 domains in the world, which is very cool to see for a passion project.

More specifically, in the last 30 days at the time of writing, iBaguette.com has seen 3,520 unique visitors. This equates to 42.25k we traffic requests sent and 1.39GB of bandwidth used in total.

Below is a heatmap map of the site's visitors: 

I also use Cloudflare Workers for some aspects of the site, including Cheat Sheets. This ensures that they are fast to load and available anytime, even if the core server goes down, by using Cloudflare's edge network. 

I typically see around 400 requests/day for some of these resources, peaking sometimes at 2,000-3,000/day on busy days. (I only have 100,000 credits per day for free!)

Bonus stat! There have been 32,072 SSL requests served in the last month.

A short Q&A session by Draggie

I have compiled a few questions about iBaguette from the community, sourced from the Discord server, in my DMs and via email. I might do another dedicated Q&A post in a few weeks or so, especially if the rate of questions I get continue! I've been surprised by the amount of developers, users, friends and educators who have been in touch.

"How do you ensure that the content on the iBaguette website is high-quality and relevant to your audience?"

Hmm, interesting question!

Ensuring that our content is high-quality and relevant to our audience is a top priority, as seen on my YouTube channel where I do not compromise on the audio quality at all by using completely uncompressed codecs and conversion methods. This ideology applies to all aspects of this website too.

 

Regarding its relevancy, this is up to the individual users to decide. I post a variety of content, and while some people may be more interested in seeing posts about BaguetteBot as they are a Discord server moderator, for example, they may not be interested in the Brawl Stars music which I post to my YouTube channel. 

This is why I have implemented Blogger's labels feature, so that users can search and see specifically the type of posts that they want on the site, rather than something they are not interested in. Moreover, the site has an RSS feed as well as being compatible with Google News and Brave News, so anyone can get this high quality content even when not on the site, as well as seeing things potentially they may not otherwise see.

"What do you see as the future of the iBaguette website, and how do you plan to continue innovating and improving the platform?"

I'd say that specifically saying "innovating" is a big ask, but I'll give it a go. 

Predicting the future is challenging, but I am looking to invest more time and resources in the cheat sheets and revision resources side of the website. This has grown massively, more so than I ever expected, with it spreading from just me using it, to classes getting last minute revision help and now it being recommended from different educational institutions to other educational institutions. Whilst I do not want to put it behind a paywall, I have been advised to do so by many educators, so this may be the future. 

On top of this, I have trialled using the cheat sheets page to link to other revision resources like a friend's Google Docs as well as Memrise, for example. I see this space growing more in the medium to long-term too, so I'm looking at ways of expanding the reach and refreshing the experience of browsing through different revision resources, study aids and past papers.

I'd also like to incorporate more general educational resources too, designed to be more towards educators and teachers, for example, rather than just students. While iBaguette's cheat sheets have already been recommended by teachers due to them being particularly reliable, factual and up-to-date, I think that designated educator material will be beneficial for the portfolio of material the site offers.

I guess that could be considered as innovation and improvement? :)

"Can you share any success stories or positive feedback that you've received from users of the iBaguette website?"

Haha, I can definitely share a few! 

I've received quite a few "thank you" messages from friends and students alike who have used my revision resources to get a leg up against others in an exam, with my breakdown of more complex topics in Computer Science, for example, being extremely useful for clarifying concepts. One of my proudest moments was when a friend who was struggling with their programming class reached out to me for help. I shared my website with them, and they were able to use it to get caught up on the material and eventually pass the theory exam with flying colours!

Another success story comes from a fellow student who was preparing for a job interview at a tech company. They used my cheat sheets and revision resources to refresh their knowledge of some programming languages and concepts, and ended up impressing the interviewers with their knowledge; he got the job that day!

On top of that, now I'm thinking about it, ther's also been some positive feedback from educators who have recommended my website to their students as a valuable resource for studying and preparing for exams, and who have been fairly surprised when I told them that they could use it completely for free.

Yeah, overall, the positive feedback and success stories that I've received from users of the iBaguette website have been incredibly motivating, it's really great to hear that my work is paying off and making a difference for other people too.

That's a wrap!

That's it for this post's content. I hope it has been informative for someone else, and hopefully it doesn't get drowned in the sea of mindless content there is!

- Draggie

Last updated: 10/04/2023