Blog on Not the Answer

Switching to Hugo

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 15:06:41 +0000

Over the course of my life, I have used various blogging framework thingies. IIRC I have used wordpress and blogger at some points in the past, followed by fireblog, which was made by me. I have had several issues with fireblog:

It is dynamic. I could change it into an SSG or a static/dynamic hybrid thing, but I can’t be bothered at this point in time.
It is slow. The reason for this is that the server has been on a slow connection, on a slow server with a dynamic ip address.

So, I am now switching to hugo, hosted on gitlab pages. So I don’t have to worry about hosting costs, and I get a versioned history of everything. And hugo has lots of themes.

The downside is I don’t get comments, unless I use disqus (which I am on the fence about). But meh.

If you’re curious, the source code for this new blog is here.

New Simple Theme

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 15:00:30 +0000

I’ve just merged in a new theme, which I’ve called “simple”. Because it is meant to be dirt simple. And it is. For at least the next few hours, this blog will provide a demo of it. There are still various tweaks I should make to it, maybe add a splash of colour, resize things, but it at least passes the tests.

Blog is now running the latest code

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 23:12:54 +0000

Since I put the blog source code onto Github, I have been working on the code there, fixing bugs and stuff. With the code being on Github, I can work more easily and frequently on the code, but for the past few weeks I haven’t been updating the code this blog itself is running, as it would require a bit of effort and I’ve been busy.

Well, I have just redeployed this blog with the latest code. I have fixed some bugs around caching, made changes to urls and how posts are looked up (a big change to make), started improving pages that show multiple posts, and other stuff. In short, I’ve been busy improving stuff. The funny thing is that you shouldn’t really notice all of those things…

Source code for the blog is now on Github

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 22:55:30 +0000

Yes, you read that correctly. The source code that runs this blog is now on Github. Unfortunately I am not good at coming up with names, and fireblog was the best I could think of.

Putting the source code on Github helps me in several ways:

Showing people the code is way easier.
Working on the code is possible from pretty much any decent computer with Internet.
Open source is cool and all that stuff…

Site is now online (after yet more downtime)

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 21:56:32 +0000

Yes, I know, for the past few days the site has been offline. I played around with partitions, and as always assumed that I would be able to get the site up and running in only a few hours.

How wrong I was.

I had to compile python twice as I hadn’t installed various packages before the first compilation. And the compilation takes ages. And then even the package server thing I was using went down for a while due to dns changes on their end.

On the other hand, I understand well how to get the site up and running. It is relatively straightforward, although I have made one change and am using cherrypy rather than uwsgi. More because I had trouble installing uwsgi. But meh.

Temporary dropping of SSL

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 11:53:07 +0000

You may have noticed that the website no longer is using ssl/tls. Before, I was using cloudflare. On their end, there were some issues which have meant that I’ve decided to remove them from the loop for the moment. Of course, this does remove a layer of protection, but I am relying on extremely low traffic. And this is definitely not a mission critical website by any means. Anyways, I have been working no decoupling the code for this website to make it easier to maintain. And hopefully, it will allow me to have more fine-grained caching too. I have also increased the thoroughness of the automated testing and just basically tried to do non-visible changes. So no functional changes whatsoever. There are still one or 2 more things to do before deploying this new code, and I need to fit this in around my other commitments. Meh.

Belated update 16/9/15: Yeah, I’m back on cloudflare. Apparently the ssl issue is to do with certain browsers not liking SNI. Meh.

New polymer theme

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 01:29:43 +0000

OK, so I have been working a new polymer theme for this blog. I have just deployed to production and already have found various issues with it. The worst issues affect me.

Of course, i did test the website beforehand. The issues i am finding now are around performance and usability on a mobile. The performance, i have a quick fix that should go partway towards fixing the problem. But the real problem is probably that using polymer results in a lot of dependencies.

Anyways, we’ll see how things go when i get time to work on the issues.

UPDATE 12/7/15: Shortly after I made this post, I fixed the issue around scrolling not working. And tried to speed the website up slightly by playing with some config settings. And I resized the title to make the header bar look a bit better IMO. However, I expect that HTTP2 will give a speedup, whenever nginx get it developed.

UPDATE 17/7/15 I have added some more caching. However there are bugs in it I think. But they shouldn’t affect anyone except me. I have started to understand how much of a pain caching can be and how much of a speedup it can give.

Notes on the current blog setup

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 14:54:55 +0000

I thought it might be nice to give some information on how this blog is setup.

Web framework

First off, the blog has been made using python, with the pyramid application framework. I compared various python Web frameworks and pyramid seemed to have good documentation, plenty of support and a nice api. And they also have some nice tutorials on getting started, and some starter templates.

I considered django but pyramid seemed a lot more flexible. Things like being able to choose any database and template engine you want, without things being hard to get working together, were a draw for me.

Servers

The nice thing about python is that most Web frameworks use WSGI, which means you can switch between different Web application servers without too much fuss.

For development, I tend to use waitress as it is the default Web application server that comes with pyramid.

For production, I have used waitress, cherrypy and uwsgi at different times. At the time of writing I am using uwsgi. But they have all generally been ok to use.

In front of the Web application server I have nginx. Nginx is awesome, in terms of its size, speed and resource usage. It also has native support for the uwsgi protocol which is one of the reasons why I am using uwsgi as the Web application server.

More out of caution than anything else, I have the whole website sat behind cloudflare.

Dynamic DNS

My ip address keeps changing, so I have to use something like ddclient to keep cloudflare updated with my ip address. I don’t like ddclient though (it’s written in perl and is a pain to install manually) so I’ve written a basic python script to do the job for me instead. Nothing fancy, but it does the job.