silentYak » Blog

Windows Live Writer

RRI — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 02:59:47 +0000

I’ve always liked the idea of using a desktop client to post to my blog. (Somehow, Google never managed to sell me on the browser-as-an-OS idea.)

Now that I have a laptop with Windows 7 on it, I’ve decided to give Windows Live Writer a test-drive. Here goes nothing.

Excuses

RRI — Sun, 23 May 2010 05:25:31 +0000

Pick up ten random blogs on the Internet and at least one of them is sure to have an apologetic note from the author explaining why there have been fewer than usual updates recently.

Gather some statistics and add a punchline, and I’m sure this will be a great xkcd strip.…

Minimizing Downtime

RRI — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:26:34 +0000

Now that this site is hosted on my own server, I wanted ensure that the server is up and running most of the time. Although five 9’s is not my availability target, I needed some mechanism by which changes and updates that I made to the site were not reflected in the production website (can I call it that?) until the right time.

The solution is a simple one: run a development website in parallel, so that all changes can be tested on that first. Updating the primary website would be like flipping a switch. Here’s how I managed this:

Set up a new virtual host for the development site.
Set up a new database for the development site and populate it with existing records.
Update the WordPress configuration file to select a different database based on the current working directory.
Set up server authentication for the development website.
Write an init script to copy (rsync) all the files from the development site to the primary one. Exclude the authentication files like htpasswd, of course.
Set up a dependency on the new script in Apache, so that restarting the service also restarts Apache (this is useful at times).

It’s as simple as that!

Scripting Magic

RRI — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:04:21 +0000

It’s amazing how much can be achieved with the help of a few scripts. If you come to think of it, scripts are the original mashups that Web 2.0 has venerated in recent times.

Today, I decided that I would have a “Now Listening” box shown on my blog — I’m not sure if it is visible at this moment — which would display the name of the artist of the currently playing track on my computer. So here’s what I came up with -

A Bash script that would use DCOP to query Amarok, determine the currently playing song, and update a temporary file accordingly.
A small PHP script that would read the file and display this information, but only if it is available.
A set of CSS rules to format the generated XHTML.
A cron job to execute the script every minute.

Voila! It’s done…almost like magic.

A Fun Way To Spend A Saturday

RRI — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:48:37 +0000

Don’t try this at home, kids.

Open a console window on your trusty old Linux box.
Find a WordPress plugin you don’t need.
Start typing rm -fr /path/to/wordpress/plugin-name.
Instead, type rm -fr /path/to/wordpress and press enter.
Oops.
Spend a few hours setting up your blog all over again.
Sleep.

Step #5 is the part I love the most.

Time For Change

RRI — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:39:30 +0000

I know that the title of this post sounds like an election slogan, but that’s not what this is all about. This change is all about domain names and CNAME records, but I won’t say too much about it. The bottom-line is that I decided to host this site on my own server, rather than on a shared webhost, and with that change, I also decided to start the blog afresh. You may rest assured that this had nothing to do with being too lazy to port the old blog to a new location, but you’re not going to believe me are you?

If the site seems to be too slow to load, please leave me a message and I will urge my server to work harder. Don’t worry, it listens to me.