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.

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.

CloudFiles and Swift has a neat feature that allows you to provide a temporary URL for users. You can limit the URL by method and time. This is useful if you have a file you want to allow someone to download temporarily, but not make completely public through the CDN. Note My examples will use Rackspace CloudFiles, but you can do the same thing with any Openstack Swift setup, provided it has the TempURL middleware enabled in the pipeline.

I belong to geekdom and I get their emails about things going on. Personally I don’t spend a lot of time at geekdom, because it is not near my house or work. It is in Downtown San Antonio on the 10th and 11th floor of the Weston Center. I like the idea. It’s billed as a collaborative workspace with community events. It seems to be populated mostly by “social media marketing ____” types, which means there isn’t a lot of things I’m interested in going on, but tons of buzzwords flying about.