Project Alphaberry - Part 2

Well, I started digging into the metal a bit this week. I now have a few linux machines laying around, and the starts of a real server infrastructure. Project Alphaberry continues…

Project Alphaberry - Part 1

As you have seen from recent posts, I am currently writing some software to pull down a lot of the content from my old website. At the same time, I am preparing the new hosting platform, as well as my own little playground, dubbed “Project Alphaberry”. In this first post, I want to talk about the “Alpha”.

Migrating Old Website - Part 2

In this second part of the migration of my old website. I take some time to add a lot of needed features to my importer application.

One of the first issues I noticed, is that the path is going to be troublesome for me to map if I don’t maintain the same file names, while the slug library that I found did a great job, I need to keep them consistent with the previous posts. I now modify the code to use the path from the post and use the net/url package to parse the link from the RSS, and then parse out the directory/filename.

Migrating Old Website

I have an ancient website that I pay a hosting company monthly for, and it isn’t cheap, due to never downgrading my plan. It currently runs on a Windows VM with a MS SQL server backend. Unfortunately, I haven’t modified this website in ages, due to the site just being… outdated. I want to migrate this off of the expensive site, and host it in either Github pages or a tiny host on Amazon EC2 to get my price down, and make it so I can start upgrading the site in place a bit more manageable.

Blogging with StackEdit

As mentioned in my last post, I am not happy with Live Writer anymore, and would prefer to use Markdown. However, Google Blogger (this blog engine) doesn’t support Markdown. Before rolling my own blogging pipeline, I did some minor googling, and found out that StackEdit supports publishing to Blogger!

Re-Evaluating Blogging Software

I have to admit, when I started this blog, I wanted to roll my own, but instead decided to just use Google Blogger. This hasn't been a horrible experience, but when doing code samples/snippets, I now find myself going into the HTML source and adding <pre> statements. I should also note that I am using the Open Live Writer (previously Windows Live Writer) to modify blog posts, with the exception of this one. And it takes... some massaging to work, basically, I write up the post, which is super tiny on my 4k laptop display, publish a draft, then go fix up the spacing (usually entering additional line breaks) to make it not look like garbage.

I think I might start looking at switching back again to a compiled github pages blog again, because writing markdown just feels so much more natural to me, rather than having to use a WYSIWYG editor these days, its trivial to get a mark down preview of your blog. Heck, I might even roll my own compilation chain with node or golang and open source it to compile the site.

Getting started with golang

You would think that as a polyglot, jumping into a new language would be pretty easy, and while Go’s syntax is pretty easy to get used to, this language actually had some hurdles to get used to in the development environment.

In this post I will talk about installing Go, setting up a project directory, and building a simple Hello World. While this doesn’t sound that complicated, you will be a bit surprised.