Blooming Cacti

I've been thinking about switching my blogs from being generated with Pelican to being generated with Hugo. Pelican takes nearly 30 seconds to rebuild my main blog, while Hugo promises to work much more quickly.

Pelican is written in Python and needs to be installed in a virtualenv, with a …

Note: I wrote this post 2 years ago, in a Houston hotel room. I recently realized that I never actually posted it to the blog.

I’m thinking about ditching PHP and using Python for web development. @marcoarment linked to PHP: a fractal of bad design. It’s a comprehensive …

This post is a bit of a grab bag, of the final things that I did to set up my new Linode server: the videohub migration, setting up Postfix, setting up logrotate, setting up offsite backups.

I saved the hardest challenge for last: migrating my Wordpress multisite install. There are 5 active sites inside of that install and about 3 inactive sites, as well as a decent amount of uploaded media. I wanted to figure out all of the other wrinkles first, before I tackled the most important PHP application. As if all of that wasn’t enough, I decided that I wanted to move the Wordpress installation from its previous domain (desertflood.com) to its current domain (wordflood.net).

In my last post I talked about a plan for securely setting up PHP. After making the plan, I had two goals: test it to see if it would work and automate the setup.

The most important sites that I need to migrate from Joyent to Linode are PHP sites, primarily my Wordpress multisite network. I’ve been dragging my feet on it though, because I want to be paranoid about security and I couldn’t figure out how to be properly paranoid with PHP. After all, the [...]

When I set up a new account for my parents, they’re always annoyed by my password choice: long, nonsense strings of letters, numbers, and punctuation characters. There’s a reason for that though: if you can think up a password, someone else can crack it with hardly any effort at all. Ars Technica [...]

The last site that I’m going to move this weekend is a small: my personal URL shortener, using Lessn . It’s a good small test, because it uses PHP and it will let me make sure that I can get PHP working, without having to mess with a large, complex site. I’m [...]

I talk about migrating my rails app from Joyent to Linode and what I had to do to get it working.

After Joyent’s decision to terminate my lifetime hosting account I had two options: I could stay at Joyent, for 5 years, using a SmartMachine (their Virtual Private Server). Or I could take a refund of my original purchases ($600) and go elsewhere. I decided to go elsewhere. Right now, I don’t want to be [...]

For the past 7 years, I've hosted all of my websites at Joyent. Over the next 7 weeks, that will change.

I’ve been increasingly thinking of ditching my GMail account. I have a couple of reasons for wanting to do that but they mainly boil down to one thing: I don’t like how comfortable Google is with delivering products that don’t pay attention to details. For instance: You can’t rename a [...]

Amazon is all set to announce an update to their Kindle product list, tomorrow morning. The rumor mill is pretty certain that this will involve the debut of some kind of a tablet device and not an update to their existing eInk Kindles. I’m really only interested in the eInk Kindles. I like [...]

I generate my video files from iMovie and dump them into a folder. I generally generate both a high and a low quality video. I need a way to painlessly: Detect the video quality of the files Generate a stub post for the file, with appropriate height / width values, and links to both the [...]

Several years, I created a site I called VideoHub to get around the problem of depending on third party websites to serve my content. Now, I need to update and modernize it.

We are moving... to a new site. If you like reading about our family life (and why wouldn't you?), you'll need to update your bookmarks. We're moving to thosemartins.us.