Category: Publishing

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My adventure into self web-hosting (Part 1)

If you had asked twenty-something me how he thought forty-something me would be hosting his website, he’d have predicted I had a rack of small servers in my attic, as part of a grid-computing business. (That’s what we called “cloud” computing back then.)

He’d have been disappointed to find out I’m using a shared web-hosting service, but that may change.

“The end of the day, remember the way, we stayed so close to the end, we’ll remember it was me and you ’cause we are gonna be…”

Over the Cliff

It all started when my article, Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit made it to the top of Hacker News and stayed there for three hours. I was careful to try to not overburden the system by switching on an HTML cache. This way, visitors would only be served up static files without the server having to run the PHP code or talk to the database. Despite that, the server went down and I had to post a sheepish comment with a link to a mirror.

It was clear I was out-growing my current web-host. Despite my precautions, it couldn’t handle being popular for a few hours. Not only that, I’m a software developer and I wanted to develop software. The only practical choice on this service was PHP and I had long decided that life was too short for that.

I started looking at VM services as the natural next step on the ladder, but it was a chance discussion, again on Hacker News, that gave me an idea.

Clifford Stoll: “a heavy load on my raspberry-pi web server told me something was happening…”
Me: “your web server is a Raspberry PI, and its holding up while being on the HN front page?”
CS: “Hi Bill, Yep. Cloudflare is out front, so the actual load on the rasp-pi is mitigated by their content-delivery network.”

Suddenly, the idea of hosting a web server in my attic became real again. Reality had long since taught me that residential ISPs were no good for serious web hosting – but if there was a service that could deal with the bulk of GET requests and it could cover the occasional outage on my side from its cache, that’d change everything.

“Can you deal with my GET requests?”

Tunnelling

At the time, that Raspberry-Pi web server was on his residential ISP with a public IP address. That arrangement wouldn’t work for me as my own ISP didn’t allow their customers to run services like that. However, in that same comment thread, the very CTO of Cloudflare (John Graham-Cumming) mentioned to him that they had an new service that allowed their customers to VPN out to Cloudflare, making such port-forwarding shenanigans a thing of the past.

(As a not-quite a declaration of bias, Cloudflare are on my list of companies I would like to work for should my current day-job come to end. I am not (yet) an employee of Cloudflare and they’re not paying me to write this in any case. By the time you come to read this, that might have changed.)

This service is completely free. While I like not having to pay for things, it does make me a little nervous. This particular service isn’t going to be injecting ads into my site and I do understand how the free tier fits into their business model. But still, I’ve been burnt by free services suddenly disappearing before and you get no sympathy if you’ve become dependent on them. I kind of wish I could give them a few pounds each month, just in case.

Leaving such concerns to one side, I had a plan. Acquire a server and install it into one of the slots on my IKEA KALLAX unit the TV is sitting on. Plug it into my ISP’s router and once that’s running, install a web server along with the VPN software. I’ll finally be in charge of my very own web server, just like the twenty-something me thought I’d be.

“If I get to know your name, well I could trace your private number, baby. All I know is that to me, you look like you’re lots of fun. Open up your loving arms, I want some, want some. You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round…”

Quiet!

I had acquired a second-hand PC for this purpose but once I got it home it was way too noisy. I needed a machine I could leave switched on 24/7 in the lounge where we watch TV. My server would have to be really quiet.

I also considered a Raspberry Pi, the same hardware Clifford Stoll used, but I wasn’t going to only be running a few WordPress instances. I had an idea I wanted to develop and I’d need a database with plenty of space for that to work. An SD card and maybe some USB storage wouldn’t cut it.

I’m not in particular hurry to buy it as I still want to plan some more before the new machine starts taking up space. It was while I was reading reviews for various machines when I had the craziest of crazy ideas.

“And as we sit here alone, looking for a reason to go on. It’s so clear that all we have now are our thoughts of yesterday. La, la la la…”

It comes with Windows

Any PC I could buy is going to come with Windows pre-installed and fully licensed. I was always going to replace it with a variety of Linux, but I wondered, why not keep the copy Windows?

Before you all think I’ve gone insane, there are a few benefits to doing it this way. I use Windows a lot for my day job so I’m familiar with its quirks and gotchas. Even though there’s a dot-net for Linux, my development machine runs Windows so there would be fewer surprises when the development machine runs the same OS as the production machine. For the handful of WordPress sites I wanted to run, there were docker images available. Finally, because it won’t be directly connected to the scary internet I wouldn’t have to panic when there’s an update.

But even as I’m writing this, I feel I’m going to regret doing it this way. I just know I’ll be writing part six of this series and it’ll be all about installing Linux on that server machine because there’s just one stupid thing I couldn’t get working on Windows. We shall see.

A foreshadowing?

Join me for part 2 of this series, where I’ll be experimenting with getting WordPress running from a Docker container. Wish me luck.

Picture Credits:
📸 “Kee-kaws”, by me.
📸 “Duke”, by my anonymous wife.
📸 “Haven Seafront, Great Yarmouth”, by me.
📸 “Quiet Couple” by Judith Jackson. (CC)
📸 “Blisworth Canal Festival, 2019”, by me.

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My Incredibly Stupid Diary

🥇First Entry
⚾ Random Entry

Years ago, 2004 to 2007, I had a website. It was mildly popular – I counted the number of readers and found I had eleven regulars. I called it “The Incredibly Stupid Diary of Bill”, although I added a few friends as writers and “of Bill” very soon became “of Bill et al”.

I occasionally posted long form pieces, but mostly it was quick-and-short stuff that these days I would post to Facebook or Twitter. I used Blogger before it was BlogSpot. Back then, it worked by connecting to my web server and uploading HTML files over FTP. I’d leave my password configured with Blogger so that in case anyone commented, they could update the page with the comment without having to wait for me to allow it.

Along the way, I started a weekly feature – Animated Short of the Week . Each Sunday, I’d pick a Flash-based animation and post a link to it. These would usually be my favourite from the back-catalogue on AlbinoBlackSheep but it was something I really enjoyed doing. It would also become an incentive to post *something* as I wouldn’t want to have two animation post next to each other. I made the decision to stop posting them after 100 posts. It was becoming more and more difficult to find good animations and it felt like the quality was on the decline so 100 selections seemed a good place to stop.

“You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.”

Time passed and I eventually stopped using writing. I had a new hobby, making old-school YouTube videos. This was the day when videos were limited to ten minutes and there was no such thing as a professional YouTuber. You can see the decline from the last handful of posts – 80% of them are just links to my videos.

When I finally made the decision to moth-ball the site, I wrote one last post and published it. A few more comments were written and the servers at Blogger dutifully updated my website via FTP, but that was it. One day, I changed my password on the web server but didn’t update it on Blogger. That last revision would be fixed as it was left, with a non-functioning comments form to boot.

For a while, my website became nothing more than a bunch of links to my social media websites, although my old posts were still there if you knew the addresses, ready to respond to searches. By now it was a folder full of static files, just as it was left when Blogger did that last FTP connection.

Now, I’ve been reminded about that old website and I wanted to give it a bit of a tidy-up. There were several files all with very similar HTML structures. I wrote a program to loop through each file, remove obsolete stuff like the comments form, added a navigation gadget and made it a nice website again.

A lot of external links have since gone, so I wrote some code to change those links to archive.org links, using the time-stamp of the original post. I made an exception for the AlbinoBlackSheep links as the archive,org copies were all of the original Adobe Flash which doesn’t work any more, whereas the current AlbinoBlackSheep website uses updated video files.

I hope you like it. There is an awful lot of rubbish there but a few gems too. I’ll be making a few new posts reacting to some of the crazy stuff I wrote. Good times.

Start with the first post: Let’s try that again.
Or jump to a random post.

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Dear WordPress. Please stop using MySQL.

This may very well end up being my last Blogger based post as I’m slowly adopting (self-hosted) WordPress as a publishing platform. I have a set of websites running on a commodity cPanel-based shared host, with a view to moving to a dedicated VM in due course. While setting things up and playing about with WordPress, I kept tripping over an obstacle that just kept getting in the way of doing what I wanted to do.

MySQL was that obstacle.

Dear WordPress, please have an option to use a file-based database (such as SQLite) instead.


Why would you want to do such a thing?

First of all, simmer down, MySQL is a perfectly good database. It does the job it was designed to do very well. My problem is that MySQL exists on a server separated from the rest of WordPress.

Think about what makes up a single installation of WordPress. You’ve got a bunch of PHP files, the themes, the plugins, the images and media I’ve uploaded. All of these are in a single folder on the web server. I could ZIP the folder up, UNZIP it later, push the folder into GIT version control, all in the certainty I’m got everything. Except…

Some of my website is not in that folder. It’s on the database. I can’t just ZIP the website up because an essential component is off in another realm. That folder does not contain everything and I now need to keep database backups alongside the folder backups. Grrr…

I was considering adding a plug-in to one of my live websites. Because people were using it, I didn’t want any down-time. Accordingly, I made a copy of the website folder and also made a copy of the database. The new copy then had to be reconfigured to point to the new database and only then could I play about with whatever plug-in or theme I wanted to add. Whatever clones and copies I make, the database is always at arms length and I need to be very careful that the PHP is always linked with the right database and that I’ve not got any cross-overs.

If the data on the database were on a file in that folder, there would be nothing external to keep track of. Copy the whole folder and job done! Taking backups would mean zipping up the folder and everything is there without worrying about keeping the two parts in sync.

Wouldn’t that make the site inefficient?

Maybe, but I plan to use very aggressive caching. There’s a plug-in where the site contents end up as static files and the code accessing the database only has to run when I log into the admin panel or the cache engine decides its time to update itself.

I can imagine this might not work so well for a site where changes happen very frequently. Maybe, but I suspect those are in a minority. For them, MySQL would probably still be an option, but it feels like for such a website, WordPress itself probably isn’t the right tool for the job.

Incidentally, I don’t plan to support commenting because I do find moderation a bit of grind. Because I’m just one person and I have other stuff going on in my life, there would be a very long delay between someone posting a comment and my approving it. The better quality discussion tends to happen on sites like Hacker News where there is an active moderation team that I can’t even hope to match.

Why not use a WP site manager tool?

Since WordPress are probably not on the verge of releasing an update with SQLite option, I will probably end up doing exactly that.

I already have tools for managing folders and zip files. Cloning a website could be a simple folder-copy operation were it not for the separate database. Tools that know about the database are very nice but it all feels like the wrong answer to the question. We’re all in a world where things are in the state they are in and we have to stoically make it work. Site managers fix the symptoms but they don’t address the underlying issue.

Picture Credits. (All CC.)
• “Me And My Shadow” by “DaPuglet”.
• “Trees” by RichardBH.
• “Like a string of pearls” by Thomas Rousing.

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I need a good podcast catcher (and a bit of a rant)

I listen to podcasts on my daily commute. These are radio shows that can be downloaded over the internet and listened to later. However, to keep up with a weekly show, I’d have to – every week – visit the show’s website and manually download the latest episode. That would get real tedious real fast. To resolve the tedium for us all, the podcast catcher app was invented.

Podcast catchers allow me to list all the shows I want to listen to. Every day or so, it automatically checks each show on the list to see there are any new episodes for me. If it finds any, it downloads them and plays them for me.

Currently, I use Google’s ‘Listen’ app, but that service is about to be closed down with the imminent closure of Google Reader. I need to replace it. I’ve downloaded a handful of alternative apps, but they all lacked a feature I find essential. I remain a little flabbergasted that any podcast app out there does it any other way.

“She smoothes her hair with automatic hand and puts a record on the gramophone.”

My daily commute is ~45 minutes of driving each way, so for me, a good player needs an Auto-Play mode. When one show finishes, another should start playing right away. There’s very few places I could safely pull-over and having to push buttons while I’m driving is right out.

But not just any Auto-Play mode. Oh no. All the apps I tried had an Auto-Play mode, but they all did it so very badly.

Ask yourself – When a show finishes playing and Auto-Play is switched on, which show from the list of unplayed shows should your app select to play next?
   A. The one that’s been waiting in the queue longest.
   B. The one that appears next in the list when sorted by episode title.

Did you pick A or B? Sorry, they’re both wrong, and yet these were the only options available on an awful lot of podcast apps.

The right answer, is to play the one the user has queued up next. The “In the order I want” sort criteria. No really, who is actually asking for the order of play-back to be strictly enforced? Would anything else, perhaps, offend your sense of politeness?

   “You want to listen to the latest Cognitive Dissonance show? But what about this episode of Hanselminutes? It has been waiting paitiently in line and this is its turn to be played.”
   “I say! That would be jolly impolite of me. Don’t want to hurt the feelings of those audio files. Pip pip!”

“I sat upon the shore, fishing with the arid plain behind me. Shall I at least set my lands in order?”

With Google Listen, new episodes join the listening queue, but I can arrange them in the order I like. If I’m just not in the mood for the next episode in line, I’ll select another episode that I do want to listen to and bring it to the top using the ‘Move to the top of queue’ button.

Once I’m happy with my selection of the next hour or so’s worth of stuff at the top of the queue, I hit play and drive off. As the first show finishes, its taken off the queue and the next episode I had queued up starts playing, all without any interaction.

The few alternative apps I downloaded did not offer this. It seems such a simple thing and yet I can’t imagine the insanity of not being able to control the playing order.

If one, settling a pillow by her head should say, “That is not what I meant at all.”

Some people reading this, I’m sure, are thinking “He wants a playlist manager”.

To manage a playlist, you’d need to first create a playlist and give it a name. Then you’d need to add shows to the list and save it. Then once its played you’d need to delete that playlist and start a new one.

No. That’s just another level of insanity. All I want is a button on each episode labelled ‘Move to the top of the queue’. That’s it. If I have to perform some ritual every day to create a new playlist or whatever before I can get that button, I’m not going to be happy. Life is too short for pointless ritual.

Maybe if your UI is so user friendly that the ritualistic parts of your playlist manager just disappear, that’s fine but that’s not what I’ve seen out there.

“Oh, I have to chose a name for this new playlist. Why not just pick a random name for me? I’m only going to delete it in an hour’s time anyway.”

So there is my plea. Does anyone please know of a podcast app for Android phones that implements its Auto-Play mode… correctly? I will happily pay a reasonable subscription fee for good quality software.

If you’re an app developer and your podcast app does it correctly, please feel free to use this page’s comments for some free publicity. On the other hand if your app doesn’t do it right, please treat this page as a bug report.

Picture credits:
“Day 30.06 Voices on the radio!” by Frerieke on Flickr.
“Listening to Radio Karnali” by the BBC World Service.
The section titles were borrowed from The Waste Land and The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, both by T.S. Eliot.

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The cult of 140

Apparently, women don’t understand the offside rule. At least that’s according to some TV sports pundit who lost his job recently.

I don’t really understand the offside rule either, so I wrote this on my facebook page in response to the news.

The key to understanding the offside rule is that it doesn’t really matter what the rule is.

Make up any old rubbish, like “Goal keepers must be pipe smokers” and call that the offside rule. It is just as meaningful.

Meh. Hardly my best work, but I thought it just about good enough to post it on my twitter feed too.

That’s where I met… the cult.

FlügenWeb, Späcecode, TwitZöne, Ass Möde

Set in stone.

Twitter is famously limited to 140 characters. My message went over that limit by 78 characters. What to do?

“If it’s too long for 140 characters, make it a blog post and post a message with a link.”
Okay, but really? “Read my hilarious thought on the offside rule! http://bit.ly/√ế№Ω” (75 characters to spare! Yay!)

So my twitter readers would see my teaser message. A few may even be bothered enough to follow the link, but they would be disappointed to have made the effort of loading the page only to get such a short message.

Remember, Twitter is for short messages like mine. What can I do keeping within the Twitter ecosystem?

“The 140 limit forces people to concentrate on what’s important. Cut out the flab!”
Okay. I started with the counter at 78 characters over. Time to start trimming down until it fits. I finally got it down to…

“The key to the offside rule is that it doesn’t matter what it is. Making up some rubbish and calling it the offside rule is as meaningful.”

It was already a rather poor piece of writing when I started. Now, I couldn’t even find space for the bit about pipe smoking goal keepers. Just take it away and put it out of it’s misery!

So I’d like to challenge the 140 character advocates out there. Can you improve on my effort? Take my original message, trim it down to 140 characters and post it as a comment.

<Update> An anonymous commenter came up with
“It doesn’t matter what the offside rule is. It could be any old rubbish like “Goal keepers must be pipe smokers”. It is just as meaningful.”.
That’s probably the best the could have been done within the 140 limit, but this is the point; Is this shorter version better than my original version? In my biased opinion, no. The whole point of my message was about understanding the offside rule. Lose that word and it looks like I’m commenting on football itself.

It seems there isn’t enough room for big complicated words like “understanding”.</Update>

(Pre-emptive snarky comment: I’ve trimmed out all the bad parts of your message. I can’t post it because there’s none left!)

Picture credits:
“little ref” by Richard Boak.
“140” by Gabriela Grosseck.

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reddit’d (Followup to ‘Construct Something Else’)

Fame at last! Fame at last!

My last piece, “Construct something else!” got a bit of attention when someone posted it on reddit.That was unexpected.

Remember the rule; If you publish something that’s a bad idea in hindsight, post a “clarification” article claiming you’ve been misunderstood and that you never thought it was a good idea in the first place. Then hide in the shower.

You see, I think I’ve been misunderstood. I was reading stackoverflow and I found the question asking about c# constructors. There was the comment from Eric Lippert, talking about the possibility of implementing this feature, but they were lacking a good reason to undertake the effort. Then I remembered I had exactly what he was looking for, a real-world use case! So I wrote up my experiences in a blog post and left a comment on the stack overflow question.

I thought I was rather clear that I was just providing Mr Lippert with a use case, rather than actually advocating it. Nonetheless, some people mistakenly took my post as advocacy and responded as such. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go have a shower.

🙂

But seriously, I remain of the opinion that implementing pseudo-constructors would be a good thing, but probably not worth the time for Microsoft to implement. But first, a quick aside to clarify (there’s that word again) how it could work. Just so we’re all clear (!) on what it is I’m advocating.

A pseudo-constructor would essentially be a static factory function. Call it, and it returns an instance of the class, perhaps using a private real-constructor inside. The only difference being that it can be called using the new operator. The compiler sees that the parameters match the pseudo-constructor signature and it generates code to call that static function instead. From a MSIL/CIL view, it’s just like a normal static function.

So why would this be a good thing?

Changing the interface without changing caller code.

This is the reason I raised in my original post. If version 1 of a DLL has a real-constructor, version 2 can use a pseudo-constructor in it’s place. The caller code would have to be recompiled, but the C# code would not need to be modified.

Intellisense™ simplification.

How many times have you needed an instance of particular class, typed new ClassName, only for Intellisense™ to show that no constructors are available. You slap your forehead and remember that this class uses static factory functions instead. If these could be called with a new operator, they would all appear in the same list.

(I suspect this was the original motivation for considering the feature in the first place.)

That’s it?

There’s a few good reasons not to make this change, which I’ll briefly discuss. Enjoy.

They won’t be real constructors.
(Thanks to reddit user “grauenwolf”.)

Sometimes, only a real constructor will do. When writing a subclass constructor, you can call the base class’s constructor just before the first opening brace using the base keyword. This would have to be a real constructor call, as you can’t just decide which base class to use at run-time.

Adding pseudo constructors doesn’t take away real constructors, but it might lead to confusion when people see that a base classes constructors have gone missing.

You don’t need it.
(Thanks to “Anthony” for commenting on the original post.)

You can do all this by making a class full of delegate instances. The constructor can select what functions to fill into those delegates at run-time. Add some [Obsolete] attributes so anyone writing new code will code against the new preferred objects.

So I don’t think this new feature would break anything, except it would be taking up the time of the clever people at Microsoft. Nice to have, but we don’t need it.

If you’re in the mood for discussing future directions of the C# language, please take at look at my earlier piece on destructors for structs. I’m interested in any thoughts on the subject or any reasons why it wouldn’t work.

I hope I’ve gained a little bit of an readership from this experience. If you’re reading this, please leave a comment. Without comments, we’re just bumping around in a closed system and tending towards entropy. Here’s some nice charts for a bit of insight on the reddit people.


Picture credit:
“The Walk of Fame” by flickr user Storm Crypt.
Readership charts by blogger.

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About This Blog

Jawohl! I am Wilhelm von Hackensplat, software developer and evil genius. This is my blog.

I’ll be writing on software development, otherwise known as that-which-pays-the-bills. I’ve been doing this for most of my life, ever since mother Hackensplat bought a Sinclair ZX81 all those years ago.

I have tried blogging before, but I found myself really dissatisfied with the structure of a blog, specifically the normal view of showing the most recent posts first. To me, that’s not the most important thing. I want a casual visitor to bask in my unaccountable brilliance and see my best stuff.

This is my main beef with blogging software, that it doesn’t make for a very good document publishing system. There is a layout for blogs, and thou shalt not deviate from the norm. What I’d like is a document management system that includes a capable blogging sub-system. I would write my own perfect system, but time is short and life is hard. So back to blogging, here I am.

Genießen!


Picture credits:
Laboratory by tk-link of flickr