I have not had the time or energy to post anything in my blog for a while. This is all due to my musings in the world of comedy and also working tightly. I have however had the time to do some occasional programming. That is the greatest escape from people to a coach. Instead of arguing, the machines just obey. That’s cool and also the background I hail from. Now, when I finally have some time off, I am finishing those snippets and putting them in public.
First of all I dug up this blog and the previous one and exported the data into a format understood by Jekyll. Then I pushed them onto Github Pages. The big idea was moving from paid cloud to a free one. I have been making this transition for a while now. I have a history with all the expensive shell, virtual host and rack+plugs providers. I had a subscription with MediaTemple which was the first step towards actual cloud services. Currently, I am paying peanuts with no worry of actually maintaining the platform.
On my way I have met all these great free and almost free cloud providers. I have several applications running on Heroku. I serve my mail on a Google Apps account. There is Dropbox and there is Evernote. I am hosting my static files on CloudFiles. I perceive two things I need to get organized in this maze of services: configuration management and data flow.
By configuration management I mean that I want absolutely everything to be in my version control. I need to have all environment variables that I set on Heroku to be there. Every host in my CloudDNS needs to be there. I want to check out a single Git repository and deploy my development environment. As you can see, I have a lot of passion for this.
By dataflow, I mean accessing the data that comes from all of these services, through mail, from the camera on my phone and files I drop in my cloud storage. This I feel less passionate about but I can see when this becomes a bigger problem. Right now, I want to the ability to push a button and see fireworks when it comes to getting my code deployed. The next thing is deploying the code that is in between all of these streams.
The first thing that went open source today was something I needed for this blog and various other services. Github serves only one CNAME per user. That is a type of domain name record that states “this name has the same address as that other name, go have a look”. They suggest you go someplace else to get the redirection. I am also hosting some domains for friends who need the non-www host to redirect to be a CNAME, which is an illegal action for most DNS providers.
I wrote a small script that redirects one address to another. Damn simple and I felt like I needed it. It is called Herouter and no, it does not spell out like Hero uter or He router. I noticed, but I don’t think it will make the tool any worse even if the name is a bit strange. At least it solved a few issues for me.
The next thing in line is a configuration management tool that will provide configuration details to this and some other pieces of software I have on the way.