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A peek under the hood of the website revamp

Under the hood

_Image by riversidetransport under a CC-BY-NC-SA license

I am not a web developer. My HTML is rudimentary at best and you should be very afraid when I start poking at CSS and Javascript. Though things might be a bit prettier than they were, I’m going to take this opportunity to highlight the tools I used to give my website a makeover.

Homepage

For 5 years, I left up a “Coming Soon” webpage with some links to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I am the definition of lazy!

BootstrapFor anyone looking to quickly get a webpage up, be it for a homepage or a project page for a personal project, I highly recommend Bootstrap. Originally created by Twitter to help them standardize, Twitter later made Bootstrap open source and it’s been widely adopted and extended. Bootstrap features the latest in web development – it’s grid based, responsive and uses a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript to help you quickly build web pages.

JetstrapBeing even lazier, I used Jetstrap, a web based interface to build Bootstrap pages. Log in using your favorite service, pick from a couple of default page templates, customize them and Jestrap will take it from there. Pressing download, Jetstrap will give you the HTML, CSS and Javascript in one zip file. Quickly edit the text in the HTML files and you’re ready for deployment.

Bootswatch has created a number of themes for Bootstrap. The homepage is using the Spacelab theme. Pick a theme, save the CSS file, replace the Bootstrap CSS with the new CSS file, and done! Couldn’t be easier.

The social media icons are by Fairhead Creative. They use a combination of SVG icons and CSS to display and are available on Github.

Blog

WordpressWordPress has been powering this blog for almost 10 years. I started with the original b2/cafelog ten years ago, migrating to WordPress months later when WordPress was first released.

The blog theme is a WordPress Twitter Bootstrap theme by 320press. It features sub-themes built on the Bootswatch themes for Bootstrap and I’m using the Spacelabs theme, similar to the homepage. The theme doesn’t feature a header image that I’ve been able to find, so I’ve turned off the hero feature, which allows you to get to the blog content faster. The theme, like the homepage, is responsive, so if you’re viewing on a tablet or a mobile phone, the page will scale to the device you’re viewing it on.

WordPress plugins that are being used:

Tools

GithubGithub is the magic that ties it all together. I try and do everything in Git using source control, making it easier to do development from any computer I might be using. I’ve been using Git for a few years, but I barely scratch the surface with what Git can do. You can find my repositories on Github.

I’ve been a very happy Linode customer for a few years. If you’re in the market for a new webhost, Linode’s Linux virtual private servers are the way to go.

Last, and definitely not least, all of the code was written and edited in Panic’s Coda 2 web editor. A brilliant text / code editor, with a built-in FTP client, terminal, version control support and more, it makes it all too easy.

Planning for the inevitable

There is a small chance my website might temporarily go offline for the next week or two. I’ve been working with Site5 to transfer servers and downgrade my services, but communication has been spotty. Unfortunately, my account is technically up this week, and as luck would have it, I will be traveling when that occurs.

If that happens, and my account isn’t extended, I won’t be able to deal with it as I’m traveling for work later in the work. And then I will be very unhappy.

Cross your fingers!

Site5 Issues

I’ve been hosted on Site5 for just shy of two years, and up until last week, the service has been great. Unfortunately, I’ve had 4 outages in the last week alone, and folks over at Webhostingtalkforums are saying similar things about Site5. I’ve only done a cursory glance at other webhosts, as I would have no idea where I would go. I see a lot of technical folks and blogs hosted at Mediatemple, but their reviews aren’t much better. After the two outages in the last 24 hours, I left a heated post in the Site5 forums this morning:

I’m very disappointed with the recent downtime on Peony. I have a Multisite plan currently, and on Tues, May 22nd, Peony first appeared to go down. I let it go and it seemed to be up within an hour of me noticing it was down. The sites were unresponsive, and then they were back up, with the exception of MySQL, so a couple of my sites were displaying database couldn’t connect errors, such as my blog or forums on different domains.

The next day, May 23rd, it happened again, and I opened a trouble ticket. I was told due to several users monopolizing server resources my sites were down, and this was being addressed.

Yesterday, Sunday the 27th, my sites were down again, and I opened another trouble ticket. I was told that due to bots spamming SSH logins the server was down again and it was fixed. I wake up this morning, and my sites are still down, even though the trouble ticket said it was fixed.

I’ve been a happy Site5 customer just shy of 2 years – these are the kinds of things that have driven me to new webhosts over the years.

What disturbs and disappoints me the most is the lack of communication from the Site5 staff. If a server goes down 4 times in a week, I expect a level of personal communication showing the staff is on top of it and fixing it. In addition, in the Current Services Disruptions forum, not once is Peony listed as having a disruption. I would expect that bots flooding SSH logins would be listed as a disruption, as that is approaching a DDoS style attack.

At the minimum, it made me feel better, and a few hours later a Sysadmin posted to mention they’ve added 2GB of RAM to the server and some kernel modifications and “are going to be monitoring the server very closely now to ensure it remains stable.”

Let’s hope so. And sorry about the downtime.

Lovin' Feedburner

About 6 months ago, I burned my blog’s RSS feed to Feedburner. I was using WP-Shortstat as a WordPress plugin, and the RSS feed subscribers didn’t look realistic (and they weren’t!) as it was over reporting on the number of subscribers. I’ve been happy with Feedburner since, and it provided a very simple view to my feed’s statistics, and there was a plugin to view the statistics right in my WordPress dashboard.

When I was syndicated on Planet Foresight, I created a Linux feed on Feedburner so those users weren’t subject to my entertainment and copyright rants, and later I burned a feed of the Foresight Linux Newsletter as well.

Since then, I continue to learn more about Feedburner and its features, in no particular order:

  • Feedburner takes over Steve Smith’s WordPress plugin for Feedburner stats, renames it Feedsmith.
  • Rick @ Feedburner recaps why partial feeds are a bad thing. I couldn’t agree more – I’m too lazy to follow links out of my feedreader just because a site wants hits. I’ll usually end up unsubscribing after a while unless the site has really, really good content, like TV Squad.
  • It might be fun to create a Headline Animator – if I could do a non-cheesy looking one, might be a good way to market the Foresight newsletter
  • I can’t believe I didn’t know about FeedFlares until today – what a great concept. Add little tags to the end of your posts, such as “add to del.icio.us”, “email author” etc. See the whole list here. I’ve already updated my feed. And the have an open FeedFlare API to create your own.

I also use Feedburner as tool combined with the Foresight Wiki based on Confluence. Confluence gives you the ability to build a feed right from the dashboard, but it’s really only useful for tracking a whole space, and not independent pages.

The first feed I built was the Foresight Linux Newsletter. Using Confluence, I created a RSS 2 feed based on any news post in the Newsletter space. Confluence gave me me a feed that looks like this:

<br /> http://issues.foresightlinux.org/confluence/createrssfeed.action?types=blogpost&statuses=created<br /> &spaces=newsletter&labelString=&rssType=rss2&maxResults=10&timeSpan=180<br /> &publicFeed=true&title=Foresight+Linux+Newsletter+RSS+Feed

Not necessarily human readable, or easy for a subscribe to type in to their feedreader, though possible using cut and paste.

I took that feed, and burned it in Feedburner, and got this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter

Much better, and now I have statistics tracking for our subscribers (Which we need more of!)

The second feed I created in Confluence, was for the Package Request page on the Wiki. On this page, users can request software packages to be added to the Foresight repository, so they can install them via Conary, instead of building and compiling the software by hand.

Confluence doesn’t give you an option, at least that I could find, to build a feed for a specific page. First, I gave the the wiki page a specific label, “package-requests”. I then went to the Feed Builder, and chose to build a feed in the Developer space, with a label “package-requests” and to show all new edits and comments on the page. Confluence gave me the feed:

http://issues.foresightlinux.org/confluence/createrssfeed.action?types=page&types=comment<br /> &statuses=created&statuses=modified&spaces=kitchen&labelString=package-requests<br /> &rssType=rss2&maxResults=10&timeSpan=5&publicFeed=true&title=Foresight+Linux+Package+Requests+RSS+Feed<br />

I burned that in Feedburner and came up with:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/fl-packagerequests

So if you want to add that to your feedreader, you will see all requests and comments for new packages, as well as edits to the page when someone marks a package as added to the repository.

I’m really starting to dig the power of Feedburner.

Website Updates

I updated the blog to WordPress 2.1 last night, which has a lots of little updates. The upgrade went perfectly, and my theme and plugins seem to work without any errors.

I finally found the option in WordPress to update the feed to full posts instead of the summaries, which makes the blog much more friendly to RSS readers. A bonus effect is that it fixes the Daily Links post to post in bullet summaries in feedreaders instead of mashing the post in to one paragraph.

In addition, I switched feed management to Feedburner last month, so there should be one clean feed for everyone who subscribes, and gives me some nice statistics on who’s reading.

If anything appears out of the ordinary, let me know!

GoDaddy Follow-up

Let’s just say that I received such a form letter in response to my email, that I won’t even post it. Basically they implied it was a problem with my webhost since I don’t host with GoDaddy. It led me to firing back this, short and sweet:

Your stock answer below does not answer either of my questions.

Let me be clear as to what my questions are:

  1. Why did GoDaddy park my domain for a period of 6-12 hours on 1/9/2006?

  2. Why did GoDaddy’s account management system on godaddy.com show me my

domain expired on 1/4/2006 when I had renewed on 12/8/2005.

Those two errors above cost me another 2 year domain renewal fee as I

believed my domain had expired when it had not. Having my domain hosted by

another webhosting company has nothing to do with your account management

system or you parking my domain and showing a GoDaddy page when I visited

paulcutler.org.

Paul Cutler

Now they need to verify it’s me speaking to them, and the cycle continues.

GoDaddy Screws up

I have multiple websites through Dotster and GoDaddy, and typically register with whomever is cheapest, and then jump to a different registrar at renewal time to again keep costs down. I’ve been happy with GoDaddy’s renewal fees, as the registrars usually try to charge you double to renew vs. registering a domain, and GoDaddy usually charges the same price.

However, with paulcutler.org up for renewal, they’ve screwed the pooch pretty bad on this one. A copy of my (fairly nice) email is below, we’ll wait for their response. According to their support website their phone hold time is 17 minutes, and average email response time is 9 hours. As it’s not mission critical as the site is up now, we’ll see how their email response is.

Here’s my email / letter:

Dear GoDaddy Customer Service Representative:

I wanted to make you aware of a problem I had with your service. I visited my domain early this morning (7 a.m. CST) and I received a GoDaddy Parked Domain page. Logging in to my account at GoDaddy, it showed my domain expiring on 1-4-2006.

Unfortunately, my office network blocks webmail, so I was unable to visit Gmail to double check my last email from GoDaddy. I then assume assumed the domain had expired as the GoDaddy account page showed, and GoDaddy had given me a week before parking the domain, as it had worked last night. I then renewed the domain for another 2 years through GoDaddy early this morning.

Upon returning home tonight from work, my domain was working again, and I checked my GoDaddy account and Gmail. Sure enough, I have a receipt from GoDaddy in Gmail showing I renewed this domain on 12-8-2005 for 2 years, and my GoDaddy account now showed my domain was now renewed through 2010.

Please explain to me why my domain was parked when I renewed over a month ago. I feel taken now that I’ve renewed for an additional 2 years on top of my renewal in December and you have even more of my money. I’m extremely disappointed in your level of service, specifically in not displaying my account information correctly.

Sincerely,

Paul Cutler

(email deleted to avoid more spam)

Del.icio.us Bookmarking

As a (spoiled) multi-computer user, one of my small annoyances is keeping tracks of my bookmarks on different machines. I’ve tried the Firefox extension that syncs bookmarks via FTP with mixed success, and a while back I signed up for a Del.icio.us but didn’t make great use of it.

Well, now Del.icio.us built a Firefox extension that makes it a cinch to keep track of all your bookmarks via their service. Use it to find new sites, see what others think is popular, or just keep to yourself and keep track of your own bookmarks.

I’m adding bookmarks like crazy, and may just wait for the import service to kick back in as it seems to be down. I highly recommend del.icio.us.

Apatheia.org Down

It appears Peony, the server Silenae.com and Apatheia.org live on over at my webhost, Site5, has had a hard drive fail.

If you’ve come here for an update, you can track the status at the Site 5 forums here.

If they can’t restore the hard drive, they’ll load backups from last night.

Wikis as Websites

One of the latest trends in open-source development, is for the projects website to be created with MediaWiki.

This article on Acts of Volition lists a couple others, as well as one of my current favorite pieces of software, Banshee, a music management and player for GNOME. (I’ve been meaning to blog about Banshee for well over a month).

I still have to put a long term plan together on integrating silwenae .com/.net/.org, and MediaWiki might address it. I don’t need all of the power of a Drupal, WordPress is already running my blog, Jinzora will power my music, and Flickr does my photos. I just need something sticky enough to link it all together.

I went and installed MediaWiki on the Apatheia.org website to see if the guild had any interest in using it as a tool. I’ve long thought it might help facilitate guildmembers signing up for a raid, managing rosters, etc, as the guildmembers themselves could update it, and you’re not reliant on one webmaster or officer to step up.

I integrated this hack to use logins from the guild forums into the Wiki, which was quite helpful. And my lack of knowledge around PHP & CSS started to show as I spend two hours last night, just playing with the header image. There aren’t a lot of good tutorials on creating a skin – especially one with a Novell-type flavor that utilizes a Wiki as a normal website. I came across this one, but it was pretty darn high level, and didn’t even go into the PHP elements.

I’m going to tinker with it, especially the navigation pieces and see what happens. I’m also curious from a social networking experiment to see if any guildmembers latch on to it.