Upgrading my Wiki

My last post mentioned that my wiki was down. Well in the process of troubleshooting the issue I discovered a bunch of things that I didn't know. It's good to learn right?

So there are a couple of things that I discovered during this process the first of which is that Python2 reached end of life support January 2020. I knew that MoinMoin used python 2 but I hadn't realized that python2 is no longer supported at all. In addition PIP, the python package installer announced what yesterday that it no longer supported python2, so you can install it via method. And so the more I thought about it the more I realized that I definitely didn't want to be running my wiki on outdated software particularly if a security vulnerability in python2 was discovered.

Google Cloud Playground

I have been playing around with the Google Cloud Platform. I have deployed a MoinMoin Wiki on a Debian vm. You can access it here: wiki.neohawk.org. So today I was leaving myself some notes on what I had done so I won't forget where I was and I realized that it counts for by "blog" to do list item. So I can check it off. I have transposed (i.e. cut and paste) it below.

New Website: First Thoughts

I've been playing with Django again and playing with Google Cloud services though I may end up trying Amazon's AWS Services. Part of it is to remember what I used to know as well as learn what's new in the cloud service world. It's been close to a decade perhaps a little more since I've really played with it. It's kind of fun getting back into it even though I'm not a coder in and real sense, but I can do simple stuff - like a django website.

Arisa and I are preparing for when we "retire" from regular work jobs. However, we'll never have enough money that we can stop working so we are loosely planning our "second careers". We both have begun our own journeys along completely separate path than we would have ever imagined. We hope to combine our separate "specialties" into a multiple service wellness business. For me that means Yoga, Meditation, and whole food, plant-based dietary lifestyle coaching. For Arisa that means Reflexology and Kikou (気功), or it's more well known Chinese name of Qigong. It is similer to Reiki (霊気) which is probably more well known in the US than Kikou. Since we are thinking about that, I figure I can kill two birds with one stone and start on our new website as I learn django and all this cloud computing stuff.

Playing with Django

It has been quite a while, probably close to a decade, since I have played with Django. Motivated partially by watching my son Ken creating an app I decided to take a look at it again. I may look at moving my website away from Google Sites which is getting worse and worse website tool. Well that's not completely fair, it makes it really easy to create really simple sites that are not awful to look at and are accessible to multiple devices (cell, desktop, etc). It is also really nicely incorporates GSuite capabilities. Maybe because I am used to being able to tweak what I use more I feel really restricted by sites.

If I do move over to Django for my website the other question is what to do with this blog. Blogger is more that sufficient for my blogging purposes and ties nicely in with photos and youtube making some of the things we probably want to do with our website. But it would also be nice to have everything in one place.

Plus it is just fun to "develop" (cut and paste code) a web site.

Damn You Byteflow!

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As many of you know, I've been using Byteflow for this site and blog. Byteflow is a blog system built in Django. The glorious design(sarcasm) is mine. I should also add that the News and Links are little modules that I created. Which I'm pretty proud of as I'm not a programmer/coder, and even though they are real simple and pretty featureless (no RSS for example).

That's one of the things I like Byteflow, which is really a blog system, is that I can build other "apps" and include it into the blog to make it a "cms". And Django is fairly easy to get your head around to do so, at least for the easy stuff.

Anyway, as I posted in "New URL", I was planning to move everything over to Google, particularly the blog over to blogger - this one in particular: robataka.neohawk.org. For one reason, it's free. Free as in no charge, not the FLOSS free. It was a cost saving measure as I run this site one a vps, from VPS Village. Now it's not terribly expensive, in fact it's inexpensive. I'm sure I might find even cheaper ones. But if I'm going to move my site for cost reasons, it'll be to free rather than for just less money.

More importantly though, I was going to switch simply because it was easier to post to blogger than it was to a Byteflow blog. My number one "complaint" or dissatisfaction with Byteflow was simply the inability to post to my blog via ScribeFire (what I'm using now) or other blog editor/tool. I always had to go in via the web admin interface. Where as with Google's blogger, I could use a blog tool like ScribeFire to post to it. It just makes it easier to post which means I'll post more often. Or that's the idea anyway.

So here I was getting ready to move. I updated my dns so that you could see robataka.neohawk.org, and I posted all of the entries from here to my blogger blog. I was playing around with Google Sites (useless for my current needs), App Engine Site Creator (cool, and usable, but just not quite right for this - I do use it elsewhere). But I was going to bite the bullet since every decision involves trade offs. I'd be getting a blog that's easier to post to, but a weaker solution for non-blog stuff. And less control, or more work really, to control the look and feel of the site.

So what do the developers of Byteflow do? They fix Byteflow so it now can handle the MetaWeblog API, and therefore using blog editing tools like ScribeFire(apparently Echto works too). Damn you! Stop making Byteflow so usable!

So now I'm back to using Byteflow at least for the foreseeable future. I may end up posting in both blogs until I finally make up my mind. But for now, Byteflow wins again.

Damn you Byteflow!

Technorati Tags: byteflow, django, blogger, google

One Down, One To Go

So I've been thinking about what to do with this site. Simply put, I'm thinking of moving it to google in some form or fashion. The main motivation is money. I don't get enough access to warrant paying any money for "hosting". I currently pay a small fee to GrokThis, VPS Village actually, for a xen virtual host. But anything at this point is too much.

I have had a test blog up on Blogger for quite a while now. It's been mostly for testing things like email posting, blog editors, gadgets, etc. So last night I finally broke down and tried to see if I could get blogger to look something like this site. While not exact, I'm close enough. Check it out.

Actually it was fairly easy to modify to make it look like this site. It's not done, nor perfect but was close enough for me to figure out what else was necessary. It also helped me figure out what I did and did not like about blogger. At least partially anyway.

What's to Like

Okay, so here's an incomplete list of what's to like:

1. It's free
2. It's linked to my google account
3. You can easily add gadgets
4. It's fairly easy to customize design
5. You can email posts to the blog
6. You can use blog editors, like ecto, scribefire, or google's Sidewiki
7. I can use my neohawk.org domain if I wish
8. Blogger itself generates traffic to my site
9. I can create a multi-author blog (me and arisa, if arisa ever posts
10. Posting in Japanese is no problem
11. Can use feedburner
12. Easy to implement Google Analytics

So that's a fairly good list of things it does for you. Here's the list of things I don't like about it

What's Not to Like

1. Miserable on html validation: the template I used had 636 errors on it. That's not even close.
2. I can not use my google apps account to use it
3. To really customize it, you have to be very careful with the built in widgets and code built in or I'll probably break the site
4. No concept of "static" pages, so it is only a blog
5. Fairly convoluted process to add Disqus which I like as a commenting system
6. CSS and some javascript is in the template -> I'd prefer them separate
7. Does not provide a way to show posts for a given author(that I can find

Based on that, you would think it's a no brainer to move to blogger. Actually thought, I'm not feeling the love for blogger. The fact that I cannot use my google apps domain (neohawk.org) to login to the site is huge, as is the effort to customize it to the point where the html, etc., is valid - and I'm still not sure I could get there because of code that Blogger needs.

In general, I'm quite annoyed with the shortcomings of google apps and it's integration with other google products and services. Picasa, blogger, google reader, openid provider, friend connect, google analytics, etc., require use of a google account. I don't want to use a google account, I want to use my google apps domain.

Granted, I can not complain too much since it is all for free. No, that's not right. I can complain because it's not "free". I'm providing information to Google as their stated goal is to index everything, I'm making it easy for them. So I may not be paying money, but I'm paying.

One of these days I'll do a serious post about Google's ineffectiveness. But for now, I've checked out using blogger. I now need to check out Nick's posts on creating a blog with google app engine.

One down, one to go.

Migrate Byteflow to GAE

I'm wonder whether it's easier to migrate byteflow to gae, or build from scratch. I like byteflow but I'm thinking it's not an easy port....

Speaking of Which

Yesterday, I posted about City Websites. Today, it's about this website. As some of you have noticed, I brought down my Planets, Planet NEO and Neohawk IT. I did this mostly for time and money reasons. The server they are running on is memory challenged and Planet NEO in particular was getting very large, memory consumption wise. It had over 50,000 posts archived. So it kept crashing, and I was spending more time trying to keep it up than I want.