Regular blog here, 'microblog' there
Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
You'd think the solution would be easy and ubiquitous. Here's what I wanted to do: My personal blog run with the Perl-based Ode system. Ode doesn't use a database. Instead it stores its entries as text files in "normal" directories on the server.
I wanted to have exact copies of everything in my Ode documents directory on my local computer and the server. And I wanted the freedom to add to or modify anything in this directory on either side (server or laptop) and have everything track on both machines.
Many of us use Dropbox (or Box, or SpiderOak, or Google Drive, or ...) to both back up some or all of our files and mirror them on other desktops and laptops we happen to use.
But what if you want to keep a filesystem in sync across any number of servers and desktops and laptops without using a third-party service?
My first thought was, "I'll just use Dropbox. Certainly there must be a way to use Dropbox on my server/VPS/shared-hosting. Nope. No. It doesn't work that way.
My second thought was, "Holy shit, Dropbox is missing out on a whole lot of revenue and screwing its users besides."
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There are 865 entries in this blog.
There are 294 images in the filesystem, 187 of which appear in actual posts.
Syntax highlighting
I am using Highlight.js for syntax highlighting.
Social updates
As I say at the top of this site, my social-style entries are posted to a separate Ode blog instance at updates.passthejoe.net. The Ruby script I use to do this is pretty ugly, but I released it on Github anyway. I started working on a version that is much more class-based (as in object-oriented), but that project stalled out a bit. I'm considering bringing this concept to Android, or doing it in Java with a JavaFX GUI, or doing it in Node.js for JavaScript practice.
Archive
The archive is not up to date due to the 2020 hosting migration. I plan to work on it.
Hello, world — this is my website
No databases were harmed in the making of this blog
You're seeing this blog, powered by Ode, through the magic of the Perl programming language and the Common Gateway Interface. Also involved: the Apache web server and Linux operating system.
Ode does not use a database to store content. Instead, every entry exists on the web server as a "flat" text file.
Comments are managed via Disqus, integrated through the work of Ode project leader Rob Reed.
Counter and categories: Thanks to Rob Reed for his help on the Counter addin, which provides the post-count and category features seen above. The show/hide feature is coded with inline JavaScript.
E-mail: stevenhrosenberg@gmail.com.
Who am I
and why am I here?
My name is Steven Rosenberg. Journalist. Programmer. Husband. Father. Fixer of the broken.
License
CC BY-NC-SA
Frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair by Steven Rosenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Links
My sites
- RSS of this blog
- Microblog of short posts
- Steven Rosenberg (WordPress)
- Click
- Come on Feel the Nuys
- Steven Rosenberg on Twitter
Ode sites
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