maintenance

Migrated to Hugo

I have been using OctoPress since a while. Octopress uses ruby and doesn’t work quite well for 1000s of posts (or so the claim goes).

I wanted to try out Hugo because of the hype of great software and fastness of generation of the static site.

Related: Why I like Go?.

Why change?

Change is the only constant

Change of thinking helps you learn and discover new things

Change is what helps the world move forward

Though change is good term to philophise, its hard to embrace change in life.

Community

There is great community for Hugo. All the code is opensource and there are 10s of themes and 100s of open source repositories to refer code from.

If you are planning to start a static website like a website or a Blog, I’d highly recommend Hugo.

Personal Achievements with Hugo

What I feel it lacks?

Jekyll and Octopress have decent ruby code and software like Middleman which is looked as an alternative to Hugo, can do lot of things like extending and writing Ruby code which is possible since Ruby is an interpreted language.

Since Go is a compiled language, you are limited to the front end code although changing the source code is always an option. I wanted to generate new product pages based on ‘Data’ attribute which is not a feature. This is useful more as a template since the philosophy is to translate files into viewable HTML files.


Migrated to OctoPress

Octopress baby!

I finally found time to migrate my wordpress(WP) site to a self hosted (at digitalocean) run via octopress.

What I know about hosting!

I previously hosted at mediatemple, it was getting costly (blame the INR drop compared with USD).

I earlier tried Linode, no bad experiences, but went on with MediaTemple on a hunch and never looked back till DigitalOcean came with super awesome $5/month reliable servers and neat interfaces

Amazon Web Services(AWS) is way too costly for non-commercial purposes.

Heroku is free but, I like to host and configure myself.

Domain Name Servers

Running free DNS on CloudFlare and DigitalOcean.

CloudFlare has faster response times compared to others and its free too.

About Octopress

Well I have lot of things to do because of the migration. I am only getting things done in the night rather than in the mornings 😃

Pros

  • Deploy from CLI
  • Write from CLI
  • No complicated UI to upload and edit html

Cons:

  • Images to be managed from CLI
  • No friendly UI to write simple HTML 😉

TODO:

  • Fix old posts
  • Write newer planned posts
  • Comments migrations from WP
  • Disqus setup for comments
  • Google Analytics


Hello Jekyll (from 5erver.in)

Note: This post was moved from 5erver.in (spelled server.in)

Intro about 5erver.in

I want to write posts about resources and configurations I find when configuring websites to desktop software.

If you do rate habits, my best one is configuring stuff.

What does this site do ?

I plan to use this site to explain details of configurations and sites, and why I choose that way.

Why not use Tumblr like my other blogs ?

I am finally over my habit of using a rich text editor to write blogs.

What did you choose to blog ?

I chose Jekyll. Jekyll is a parsing engine bundled as a ruby gem used to build static websites from dynamic components such as templates, partials, liquid code, markdown, etc. Jekyll is known as “a simple, blog aware, static site generator”.

You can as well use Ruhoh if you want to set it up faster than I did.

Why Jekyll ?

Its simple static site hosted on github. Github since anyone can just clone this repo

One could use Amazon AWS services (S3 or any CDN ) if they want to conceal the source of the software or if any customisations were made.

Why should I care ?

Since it could be too late when finding answers later than now. This is a reason dropbox always generates extra load to test their production servers .

The world has loads of free software, thanks to the Open Source Software movement. The most important thing is to do it configure it. There are many aspects in the server and the client and everything between that can be configured.

I like giving analogies, here’s one

Would you use the first gear in the car when going at 50 mph ? (Ofcourse I am talking about a car with a manual gear system. In software world, you cannot assume anything since the dependencies are more than you think)

The same way, when you configure a system, you should not deploy software to production till you load test it and know the ins and outs of systems. Although it takes time, its worth the experience.

Can’t I use chef or puppet ?

Yes, if you want to use the base software or already configured software or if you want the vanilla configuration on tens of your servers, thats the way to go.

Can you help configure my server and explain everything step by step ?

Yes, Contact me at sairam at kunala dot com

Can I contribute ?

Yes, send a github pull request or email me an markdown file with your details for reference.