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Posted on 2021-01-23 17:58 by randy

My self-hosted blogging woes continue..

It'd be an understatement to say that I'm not a big fan of Facebook. Facebook has been banning a lot of groups and accounts lately, seemingly algorithmically. That's kind of evil. I was seriously considering buying an Oculus headset until they started requiring that you sign in to it with your Facebook account; an utterly unnecessary step from a user point of view, only done so they can make more money and steal more of your information. Facebook sucks.

That got me thinking about how to completely distance myself from Facebook. I've still got a profile there that I regularly sign in to. Facebook is the only social network that a lot of my family and friends are on. There's just no alternative for chatting with groups of people that I know, because those people are only on Facebook, and so far this has stopped me from completely deleting my Facebook account. Today I thought I would finally remedy that, but before doing that I wanted to provide people with an alternative way to keep track of what I'm up to. My blog is where I would want to shift my activity to, but it currently does not allow people to comment, which is a big part of what makes a blog a blog, so that's really a must-have before I start pointing people to this site again.

There's two ways to add comments to a static blog: either you self-host the serverside part that stores the comments, or you use an online service like Disqus to do it for you. But don't use Disqus. The interface is utterly hideous and the free plan won't let you disable ads. Disqus also makes you jump through several unnecessary hoops to post anonymous comments, which was just clean and simple with native Wordpress. I would not recommend Disqus to anyone. Unfortunately none of the serverless alternatives offered a free plan for personal websites, so I'm out of luck there as well.

Then there's the self-hosted option. There's a few serverside packages that will deal with storing the comments for you if you don't mind spinning up a server. Some of them will even deal with span and email notifications. But for me this would mean 1. yet another piece of code that I have to maintain, and 2. cloud server resources that I have to pay for, especially if someone decides to do a spam attack on me. I have better things to do with my life than deal with that.

Sadly, this is the state of the internet right now. I want to get away from services I don't like, but the only way to do that is to invest time or money. It has never been harder than now to have a self-managed personal blog on the internet. Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project might be the best hope for a future internet, but I'm not holding my breath about it catching on any time soon. For now this blog will stay comment-less, and I will not delete my Facebook account yet..

Posted in Tech | Tagged , ,

Why I won't be moving away from WordPress

Posted on 2016-02-01 17:19 by rv

I've made some time for myself to do some personal projects, and one of the things that's been on my mind for the longest time was to move this blog away from Wordpress and host it statically on S3 instead. Serving a single static html page (plus a few resource files, but not many) from S3 would be so much faster than letting the shared hosting server parse endless lines of php, most of which I don't even want. The benefit in that aspect is clear, but in other areas it's less obvious.

Easy of deployment is one of the issues. I'm not bothered about not being able to post by email or mobile - whenever I have something to write I'll usually have my laptop with me. It doesn't bother me that it won't be WYSIWYG either (which it wouldn't be if I write my own blog software because I don't care about WYSIWYG). The problem is always with the software and the libraries. My software of choice for my would-be static blog is python, but I'll inevitably end up requiring some libraries that will need to be downloaded and/or set up on each machine that I want to publish from. Knowing myself, I will forget to do this before I go on a trip and end up having to download those libraries at ultra-slow speed at some hotel in the middle of nowhere. Or I might be on a public machine, which will be even worse.

Comments are another issue. If the blog is completely static I'd have to go for a javascript-based comment service. I also have old comments that will either have to be converted to the new commenting system or else inserted into the html somehow if I want to preserve them. Again, there are solutions, but they're hardly easier than what I have with WordPress.

Finally there's the issue of dynamic pages: the calendar, archive and search functionality. Calendar and archive pages are pretty easily generated, but I'd either have to remove the search function or rely on an external service for that. Bleh.

The system I had in mind would be a collection of small tools:

  • A converter tool to convert a wordpress database into raw blogpost/page files (the exact format of which I would have to think about).
  • A compiler tool that reads the raw posts and writes usable html
    • Inserts content into a predefined template, I was thinking Django templates. This doesn't have to be fast.
    • Regenerates related pages (front page, archives, calenders, category pages)
    • Converts any markdown text to html
  • An uploader tool that publishes the generated html
    • Would upload to S3, perhaps pluggable so other providers would work too.
    • Would be smart enough to recognize linked images/files and upload those too.
I'd leave the template design and making the javascript commenting system work all up to the user, since that'd be a one-off job (for me, anyway). The goal of all this is to make my life easier, but it's an awful lot of work for an awfully small amount of easiness.. Anyway, if someone else would also be interested in using something like this (or willing to pay for something like this!) then do let me know.

 

Posted in Tech | Tagged , ,

Blog statistics

Posted on 2011-03-30 13:56 by rv

Got bored today and played around with SQL and pivottables. I wanted to see if I could find a pattern in the times that I usually post, and the categories that I post in. The first image shows posting times regardless of category. The images after show a comparison between categories. [jsgallery size="large"] Note that this information is not entirely correct, because sometimes I schedule a post to be placed in the future at some arbitrary time. I usually schedule stuff late at night or when I've already made a post for that day. I've also excluded a couple of categories that didn't have a lot of posts.

  • The fact that I'm a night person is now scientifically proven.
  • Ideal post time for me is between 20:00 and 01:00
  • During the cycling trip last year (Spirit of Japan category) I rarely posted late at night.
  • Other than that there aren't really a lot of differences between categories.
For code monkeys, here's the wordpress query to get the count of your posts for each category and each hour of day: SELECT terms.name, HOUR( p.post_date ), count(p.id) FROM wp_posts p JOIN wp_term_relationships rel ON p.ID = rel.object_ID JOIN wp_term_taxonomy ttax ON rel.term_taxonomy_id = ttax.term_taxonomy_id JOIN wp_terms terms ON ttax.term_id = terms.term_id WHERE post_type='post' AND ttax.taxonomy='category' GROUP BY terms.name, HOUR( p.post_date )

Posted in Daily Life , Tech | Tagged ,

Javascript Image Gallery

Posted on 2011-03-03 00:17 by rv

I added a Javascript image gallery using jcarousel. I'm not entirely happy with the CSS, but it works, and that's what matters to me. Here it is.

Thumbnails

[jsgallery size="thumbnail"]

Medium

[jsgallery size="medium"]

The CSS is not cooperating well here. I'd rather have a dynamic height, but I need to spend some time on that to get it to work.

Large

[jsgallery size="large" include="3822,3823,3826,3828"]

These are the photos of the coldest day of the cycling trip I did last year. The location is the west side of Mount Fuji. It was one snowy, icy trip all the way down to sea level from ~1000 meters up. A day I will probably never forget :)

 

Posted in Photography , Spirit of Japan , Tech | Tagged , ,

Adding tabbed pages to Wordpress

Posted on 2011-02-28 16:52 by rv

As a side project I've been working on a way to get all my developing experience out of my CV and into a website. I started doing this in Django because that's what I knew best, but I decided to just implement all my desires in Wordpress. I haven't even begun adding content to my online portfolio, but I have been thinking about ways to display it. One of the things on my wishlist is tabbed pages/posts, so that's what I've been working on.

And here is the result.

My implementation uses a plugin for jQuery called idTabs on the client-side. On the server side I registered a new page type for wordpress for tabbed pages. The tabbed pages are hierarchical. The parent page is empty, and all child pages are added to the html as divs, which are converted to tabs by idTabs. Comments are added to the main post, and can be turned off when not needed. I really should open-source this stuff some time..

 

Posted in Tech | Tagged , ,