Background

I’ve used a bunch of technology to host my personal blog, this particular instance has posts back twelve years. When I worked at Rackspace, I played with using CloudFiles to do static hosting instead of paying for a VPS or cloud server. This was an adequete setup for a while, writing posts and uploading them. Next was using Pelican and CloudFiles, still pushing the files up to CloudFiles with Swiftly, a CLI tool for uploading to CloudFiles. Around 2019, I discovered Hugo, as I wanted a simpler setup and some automation. I used that plus CircleCI to build the content and push it up to cloud storage automatically when I pushed a new post. At this point I was no longer at Rackspace (2017 layoffs), and was using GCP, as I liked it best and was using it at Unity where I was employed.

Trying to get back in to the blogging thing. My whole netlify setup stopped working, it has been ~6 years. I dug up the old meeting points post and thought about how i’d had more ideas over the years worth sharing. At this point i can’t stand most of the socials, so i figured i’d share here.

more to come.

A friend of mine pointed out Netlify for hosting static content. I checked them out and shortly after creating my account, I was able to get this blog built, hosted, and added Let’s Encrypt SSL capability that I did not have before. No need to really set anything up except transfer the DNS to Netlify. It took less than a minute to get it setup, and another five minutes DNS transferred and done. Seriously impressive, and now running my blog!

I have been usinag a combination of Hugo+GitHub+Wercker+CloudFiles to compose, store, build, and host my blog for a while. Recently, my wercker integration broke and wercker was also purchased by Oracle. I have been pretty familiar with CircleCI for a while now, so I decided to give that a try for this process. I also no longer (2 years) work for Rackspace, so I decided to move my blog to Google Cloud Platform’s Storage service and use it for my static hosting needs.

Is this thing on?

I’m fairly sure no one acutally reads this blog, or maybe some people do when and if I post it as a “website”. It went from some ranting stuff to posting technical things related to my job. I have not been at that job for almost 2 years now, which is probably reflected in the fact I have not updated anything in a while. I do need to realign this to be more related to some of my personal projects again.

I’ve been using Hugo for a while now, on this blog, and my ham radio blog at blog.ke5eo.com. One draw back to how I’ve had this configured is that I need to generate the content on my computer, usually my MacBook, then upload using swiftly. Swiftly is a great tool for this because Hugo cranks out the content to a directory called “public” and I can use the -i flag on swiftly to upload an entire directory to a container like so:

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, most of my posts have been on my ham radio blog, so I thought I would post some cool things I’ve been playing with recently.

Rackspace just announced Carina which is a container runtime environment based on OpenStack Magnum. When I signed up, I wanted to have something I could accomplish with this new technology and thought of RethinkDB and its clustering capabilities. Sure you can do all this on your desktop/laptop, but what fun is that?

I’ve wanted to post up how I make this blog work for a while now. It seemed like a daunting task, but after I started another one for my ham radio stuff, I realized it wasn’t that hard.

You can apply this to any static host, but we’re going to host it on CloudFiles. CloudFiles is $.10/GB, and I know my blog is less than a GB. So for cents a month you can host an entire blog. Pelican gives you themes you can use, or create your own. You can use markdown, restructured text or asciidoc. I use markdown since it is easy to format and pretty standard (you can use for github docs).

Happy New Year! While I’m not going to make resolutions this year I’m going to try and do better on some things. Playing with my new ham radio has made me want to tinker with electronics more this year. I’d like to try and build a small arduino based weather station. Sparkfun has a nice kit for that. Also, I’d like to challenge myself in the kitchen. I have four Thomas Keller cookbooks now and I need to make some stuff in those!

Recently Rackspace added Role Based Access Control to the identity system. This means the main account user can create sub users and roles and that main user can allow the sub users to have access to portions of their Rackspace Cloud account. We’re only going to look at CloudFiles for this post.

note i’m going to use the tool, !(httpie)[https://github.com/jkbr/httpie] since its awesome and does some really nice formatting. it works much like curl.