Posts tagged with sysadmin - page 2

So in my previous blog post I said I was going to try and build a web app to find someone’s location using their smartphone’s location services. The first step in this is choosing a language and/or framework to build it in. I’ve decided to use Go, which a former collegue of mine tells me makes me a hipster.

So I have been hearing lately about What3Words and how the emergency services in the UK are using it to locate people. This, and other information I have read about recently has got me thinking. What3Words is a proprietary service, that the emergency services will be paying to use. Now a number of mountain rescue teams in the UK use a service developed by one of their volunteers called SARLOC which appears to have a similar set of requirements, but from what I have read appears much more useful for the mountain rescue teams that use it. Now what I have been thinking, these services both rely on the person that needs to be located to have a smartphone, with location services, and an internet connection. They both require the person to receive a link, and allow the opened web page to see their location. So with these assumptions, how hard is it to build a service that allows an operator to send a personalised link to someone, have that use the smartphone’s location services to get a current location for the user, and share that automatically with the operator?

So I have an unusual workflow for my blog. There are a number of instructions on the web for deploying a jekyll based site template to a server from a git repo, and having the content auto built into the web root. Although I do store my jekyll blog in a git repo, and have my webhosts set up to receive files automatically from git, I do not do this.

A colleague of mine started to work on a planet feed of blogs from people we both work with. The planet feed takes an rss or atom feed from each blog and sorts the posts from all of these together. My issue with that for my blog is that not all the posts I make are applicable to the work that I do. So I wanted to generate a feed that is more work related. I already use the jekyll-feed plugin to generate the feed for my blog so it shouldn’t be too hard right?

So I have been working away in the background on the migration of my blog away from the Apache Roller powered blog platform that I currently use. One of the issues that annoyed me, and I never got around to fixing (although it would probably have been easy to fix), is the fact that all my posts appear at a URL that includes the word "blog" twice. It was redundant, and irritated me, and because I never fixed it, removing that means that when I migrate the blog I'll need to set up a redirect for the old links to still work, which also annoys me, but is the cost of this migration I suppose. So I am going to do a review of the process, what I wanted to do, how far I have got, how I did it, and what is left to do.

I said I was going to migrate my blog some time ago, off of Apache Roller that it currently runs on, and onto Jekyll (probably). Well since then I've basically not done a lot, but I have now hit a minor milestone. I have managed to migrate my blog content to a new Jekyll site. It's not ready for me to publish it yet, I still have a lot to learn about how to use and set up Jekyll, I either want to match the URL layout of my current blog as much as possible, or at the very least map out the URL rewrites I'm going to need so that any links continue to work. But for this milestone I needed to get the content out of the Roller database, and into Jekyll, and for that I found the RSS importer not quite up to what I wanted. So in the true spirit of open source, I took the available tools, I hacked around with them, and I got something that worked for me, and then as I may not be the only one that needs this, I raised a pull request.

As a bit of an in joke with people I work with I registered bettercatfood.com. But the joke has since been made, and now I have a domain, and nothing useful to put on it. So I've decided to allow other people decide what goes on it. Obviously I have informed the people I work with first. And I'm only going to give write access to the repo to people I trust, which grants them the ability to not only raise a pull request, but also to merge that pull request, and merges into the master branch will deploy that code to the servers hosting the site. But even if I don't grant you write access you can still raise a pull request, and as long as there is a reasonable justification for it (which absolutely doesn't have to be serious) I'll probably merge it. The host is currently configured to only serve static content, so server side scripting won't work.

Lets see how bad of an idea this is. What's the worst that can happen?

I normally shy away from giving a set of instructions for how to do something. There are two reasons for this, often there are already better instructions than I could write out on the internet already, and also it is very easy to give incomplete, or incorrect, instructions, that when blindly followed leave people in a situation that is bad, and that they don't know is bad. However I need to have faith in my own knowledge, and I need to stretch myself.

So with this in mind, following Microsoft's purchase of Github I have finally got around to building my own git server. This is something I have wanted to do for some time, but have always shied away from. Well now I have done it, and I have also written a guide for others to follow on how to do the same.

I have started to look into rebuilding my blog based on jekyll. Part of this will mean changing code, which will need version control. As I mentioned when talking about my new hosted website this can be done in git. That git repository is just a local repository though (not counting the copies pushed up to the server). It's probably about time I had some public code repositories (not including the professional ones I have worked on, those have always been kept separate from my personal identity). However it looks like Microsoft are buying GitHub. The timing isn't great, but I'm a resourceful sysadmin, maybe it's time to host my own. Also the timing could be worse I could be invested in hosting the repositories with GitHub. So I'm going to look into Gitea as an option for hosting my own code repository. I'll let you know how it goes.

My blog is powered by Roller, a java based blog platform, and it works reasonably well for me. However I want to move my blog to be hosted off my home connection, which rather means paying for hosting that can run a Java app, and if I wish to use to use multiple servers for redundancy, I will have to set up replication of the database somehow. These are complications I do not need, and add to the maintenance overhead of my blog somewhat. So what do I need?