#Blog

20 posts tagged Blog

Scheduling posts on a static blog

· software, www

One of the things I missed moving from WordPress to Hugo: scheduled posts. WP just… does that. Set a future date, and forget about it.

And static site generators don’t… The site only rebuilds when you git push, and that’s it. 😢

Why schedule posts, you ask? Because at times I write 3-4 posts in a day, and I don’t want to spam. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I have a rule that there should only be a single published post a day, and if I know I’m out of topics (especially for FlatTurtle) I tend to add a week or 2 between posts to spread it out evenly.

From WordPress to Hugo

· misc

Can’t believe it’s been so many years… But the time has come to say farewell to WordPress.

It’s been on my mind for years, but never really put in the effort to export so many years worth of posts, media, etc to a better solution… It felt like a Herculean job and everytime I thought about it for more than 3 minutes, I dreaded the idea.

But since the future’s (finally) here, thanks to AI, I was able to export it all without fiddling with broken or paid addons and get everything in Hugo within a few hours worth of work. The site lives (for now) on Cloudflare, with the media in R2. The deploy via Gitlab-ci is (or should, let’s find out after this post 🥲) be fully automated and media should sync up in R2.

Feed2Toot

· linux, software, virtualisation

Started looking into a service to auto-post from this blog onto my Mastodon feed. Feed2Toot fit the bill perfectly.

I wanted to run the whole thing from a Docker container, though, so I'll quickly write a how-to.

This whole thing runs from a Raspberry Pi, as root. No k8s or k3s for me. The path I use is /root/git/feed2toot/, so be sure to modify that to whatever you're using.

The World's Deadliest Thing

· misc

Around 1895, whilst investigating the case of a group of musicians who had died after eating cooked ham, a Belgian scientist called Emile van Ermengem identified the bacteria at the heart of Kerber’s sausage poisonings, a disease that had been coined Botulism, after bolutus, the Latin for sausage. Later work showed that these bacteria, which Van Ermengem named Clostridium Botulinum, would only grow under certain conditions. The inside of a piece of badly stored, processed meat was ideal, but when conditions changed, the bacteria would shut down, forming highly resistant spores and remaining in that form until conditions were right again for growth.

shanwong.design

· misc

Shameless plug to get Google to index the website faster. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was playing around with the idea to up the marketing and social media stuff for Shan (WFH is taking its toll -- I was bored, always doing the same, saw Shan struggle to do both creative and marketing work, and I had plenty of brainjuice left -- and in all fairness I was probably getting a bit frustrated and going "why don't you just ...". So yeah, decided to actually help out and experiment some).

Theme

· hardware, linux, networking, software, virtualisation, www

I had the same theme for over four years. I’ve made quite a few custom css and PHP edits myself, and it had been outdated for ages… But it served me well.

theme-2011

However, it’s now time for something new.

theme-2015

As always, as minimalistic as possible.

On a side note, this blog has been moved from vm1 (and one before that) a virtual machine running on a dual Xeon 3070 (2.66Ghz) at Databarn to Akama, a VM on an 8 core Xeon E3-1230 (3.2Ghz) at Leaseweb.

https is win for spam

· www

Well, here are some stats for a longer period of time since moving to HTTPS.

So moving to HTTPS lowered the average from ~1000ish to ~200 spam comments per month (I implemented HTTPS near the end of 2011-02).

And yay, for Akismet's graphs being back. For some reason they'd been broken for ages on this blog.

How to get rid of spambots on WP?

· www

Simple, start using SSL.

Not entirely sure why this keeps spambots away, but a drop from ~100 spam comments/day (1/2) to at most 4 seems pretty cool.

Edit: seems like they just do a POST request to an old URL (http://blog.tuinslak.org/some-post), which results in this reply:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/0.9.4
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:10:24 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 184
Connection: close
Location: https://blog.tuinslak.org/

I’m guessing once they rescan the new URLs they’ll be spamming again. Just a matter of time for them to update their “bookmarks”. ;)

blog over ssl

· misc, networking, www

Starting a SSL test on this domain as of today. Free cert by StartSSL.

SSL is clearly the new hype, and this time I won’t be last to join it! ;)

Just going to check how much (if any) SSL slows down my site.

Every http requests gets automatically rewritten to https.