Blogging on Much Ado About IT

Migrated from WordPress to Hugo and Netlify

Julian Knight — Sat, 21 Apr 2018 22:00:00 +0000

The migration from WordPress is now completed. This blog and the new Knowledgebase are generated using Hugo and hosted with Netlify.

It’s done!

Please see the section of the Knowledgebase on Hugo for more information.

Switching from WordPress to Hugo

Julian Knight — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 22:00:00 +0000

I've been fed up with the speed of WordPress for years but haven't had the time to learn how to properly switch to an alternative. Until I discovered Hugo!

Hugo is a static file website generator written in Go. It generates an updated site pretty quick on a laptop for the kind of size of blog and information site I’m running.

I have also been trying out Jekyll since that is natively supported on GitHub pages - for example, GitHub itself will generate your site when you “push” changes to the repo that underpins the site.

There are several problems with using GitHub and Jekyll:

Unless you pay, you cannot hide the source code for your site on GitHub
Jekyll’s build process is very sensitive. It fails fairly often for the most trivial of reasons and when the build does fail, the help information is obscure to say the least.

You can build locally and you might get more information but then you have to install and maintain an installation of Ruby. This is a significant pain, especially on Windows. I don’t know Ruby and I don’t want to know it either.
Jekyll itself is also more than a little strange in places. With things that don’t work for no obvious reason.
While there are some themes for Jekyll, I couldn’t find any that really met my needs and writing your own seems harder than for Hugo. Though that might just be me.

So Jekyll/GitHub was not a viable alternative to Wordpress. It just about works for a simple information site like a documentation one but I certainly wouldn’t want it to be my main blogging site.

Moving away from WordPress

Of course, when you switch away from WordPress, you immediately inherit a number of issues that you have to deal with:

No dynamic content - unless you build it yourself.
No WYSIWYG content editing - unless you integrate with Forest.IO (see below). Hint: it is easy.
No search. WordPress gives this via its MySQL database integration.

Moving to Hugo

But you also get a number of advantages when using Hugo:

Blazing speed from the final output - it is HTML & CSS, no messin'
Hugo is (mainly) very comprehensible and logical. In the time it took me to learn Jekyll (a fair bit less actually), I’ve been able to start from scratch, even building my own theme from scratch. Export my WordPress blog (which I could never get to work with the Jekyll export tool) & begin fixing up the content. I’ve even merged in the pages from Jekyll.
Working with a theme is very easy. You make it a submodule using Git. That way it can be in an entirely different repository - either belonging to someone else or belonging to you (maybe cloned and edited).

Issues to resolve

I’ve not got everything worked out yet. There are some things I need to get working.

Site Search
RSS Feeds

Additional Tools

Of course, you still have to host your site somewhere. I’ve been hosting my WordPress and other sites on a low-cost VPS for some years. It works well enough but recently the VPS has been filling its hard drive and is in serious need of some maintenance. Finding a cloud service to do the heavy lifting would be nice.

So, like many, I’ve integrated a few cloud tools with Hugo to give me hosting and other utilities.

Source Code and Content Backup

This one is simple. The site is generated by Hugo either on my local PC (Hugo is a single binary install, no messing with Golang) or in the cloud. That leaves the site structure which is a load of HTML and Markdown files with some static content files.

All of the structural and content files are easily stored in a git repository. This also gives multi-versioning.

I’m using GitLab for the main site content and structure because it lets me have private repos for free (unlike GitHub). But I’m using GitHub for my theme since this can be public - indeed, I want it public so that other people can use it if they want to.

Hosting

I am using Netlify to actually host the site.

I don’t have to faff with or worry about my own server.
Netlify hosts everything for you. Not only the site but also the build process. You can bring your own Domain as well.
It is free for small sites.
You get TLS/SSL integration without having to faff with Let’s Encrypt - they do it all for you. Or you can provide your own certificate.
Netlify is also a CDN so files are replicated and delivered regionally.
You get full build messages so you can see if something goes wrong.
You get some automatic optimisations if you want them - a valid TLS certificate for HTTPS, Some file optimisations.
You get form submission for free (with some sensible limits).
You get identity management for free (with some sensible limits) using OAuth.
You get alerting with integration to email, Slack, etc. All for free.
You even get integrated Amazon AWS Lambda serverless functions for free! These are great for building small utility functions that run in the cloud and can be called using a simple REST web API. They can be a pain to set up and manage though but Netlify makes it easy.
It has a local command-line interface in case I want to control everything locally. The CLI also simulates the running of Lambda functions.

Online Content Management

It isn’t always convenient to fire up my code editor and run the Hugo development server on my laptop.

Also, it can be nice to have a WYSIWYG writing experience, or at least something close.

Forest.IO gives me a convenient web editing experience.

Very quick and easy to set up.
Edits data (e.g. JSON), not just pages and blog posts.
Merges changes direct back to the GitLab repo - git takes care of merging so it isn’t a problem to edit both locally and in the cloud.
It provides editable templates for frontmatter and other metadata.

Other cloud tools

Site search - I’ve not yet got this set up. There are several possibilities but I think it will take some work.
Image optimisation
Website testing and optimisation

Tools for Local Editing and Development

Hugo - the single binary install, very easy.
Microsoft Visual Studio Code - makes an excellent editing and testing environment.
Chrome, Edge & Firefox browsers - with their development tools.
Cmder - an enhanced command shell. Not really needed but it makes working with the command prompt a lot nicer on Windows.

Switching to Excerpts on the Front Page

Julian Knight — Sat, 06 Jun 2015 17:39:03 +0000

Some of my posts are rather long and may have more links that Google really likes. So I’ve decided at last to switch to the Excerpt view instead of a full post view on the front page. The instructions for doing this are taken from: Display Excerpts in Twenty Twelve Theme

Cloudflare Now Active

Julian Knight — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 08:50:05 +0000

After the recent high-profile vulnerabilities, I decided to turn on the free version of CloudFlare for this domain.

CloudFlare provides a reverse proxy service that sits in front of your domain. It will serve content where it can on your behalf (caching), optimise content where it can (e.g. minimising JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.). But even more important from my perspective is their ability to protect against a number of vulnerabilities.

The most obvious protection – because this is where CloudFlare started – is DDOS protection. DDOS is a way of throwing very large numbers of requests at your domain, preventing legitimate access. But CloudFlare also now provide protection against other threats and it is interesting to look at the dashboard and seeing a bunch of threats being filtered out every few days.

A recent add-on, especially to the free service, is the ability for CloudFlare to provide SSL security for free. This means that your whole site can present as HTTPS (encrypted HTTP) & you can even enforce this so that visitors cannot connect without encryption. This is easily done without the hassle normally associated with creating and maintaining SSL security.

Kudos to CloudFlare for providing this excellent service and for providing a useful free version. I’m happy to recommend it to everyone who runs a web site or service.

Update 2018-05-04

I still use CloudFlare for most of my published endpoints.

However, this blog has now been moved from self-hosted WordPress to a Hugo-based site hosted by Netlify. Netlify allows me to set all manner of security headers and has inbuilt support for Let’s Encrypt certificates.

So Cloudflare protection is no longer required for this blog.

Blog Upgrade (Finally!)

Julian Knight — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 17:29:23 +0000

It had to happen but has taken far too long. I’ve finally upgraded my WordPress sites to 3.9. Hopefully future upgrades will happen a lot quicker

Site updated – Faster and better!

Julian Knight — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 22:56:54 +0000

The upgrade of this blog from WordPress 3.3 to 3.4 on Dreamhost didn’t go as smoothly as planned. In fact it failed fairly spectacularly – unable to complete the required database upgrade.

However, many clouds have silver linings. In this case it meant that I brought forward my plans to ditch the horribly slow hosting provided by Dreamhost in the USA and switch over to the new VPS provided by BHost in the UK.

If you have had the chance to compare the two sites, you’ll know that it now runs a lot faster. It will improve again when I do some tweaking. I can now use a proper opcode cache for PHP, something that Dreamhost wasn’t able to provide.

I’ll be doing further optimisations now that I have full control, I should be able to do away with a whole load of WordPress plugins.

WordPress tweak to manage posts admin, filter and show custom field

Julian Knight — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:00:29 +0000

This tweak will change the “All Posts” page in the administration section of a WordPress site.

It adds the ability to filter the post list based on a custom field that has been used in any of the posts at any time.

If a custom field is selected but no filter value is given, all posts that contain any value in the custom field are listed.

Whether or not a value is provided, if a custom field is selected, that field will be added to the tabular view of posts. The custom field column is also made sortable (as is the Category column).

The following code should be added to the functions.php for your theme – or better still to a sub-theme.

Coping With Google Reader Changes

Julian Knight — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:30:53 +0000

If you are a Google Reader user, you will have noticed the latest design change and probably been amazed at how poor the new layout is. What you may not have immediately noticed is just what you’ve lost. In this article I look at what has been lost and what you might be able to do about it, at least in the short term.

There are a number of lost capabilities that many people have been relying on

The Sharing capability provided other Reader users the ability to see what you shared and you can see what they are sharing.
Notes allowed you to add a note whether linked to an article or not. You also used to be able to add comments to shared articles These things constituted an unofficial API into Google Reader and Google are busy ripping the heart of Reader and replacing most of the “social” aspect with links to Google+. So in the future, instead of marking an article as “Shared”, you will “+1” it and it will appear in your Google+ feed instead of Google Reader. This change will be happening over the next month or so. Thankfully, there are a few things that you can do, at least temporarily. There are a number of Google Reader specific URL’s that you can use to still access some of the information. To make use of most of the following, you will need to know your Google Reader user ID which is a 20 digit number that you can see in your browsers address bar when using Reader, this is marked as <20DigitUserId> in the URL‘s below. The following URL’s will show the various views in the normal web interface:
Shared articles:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/broadcast

No longer available directly from the web interface so it is uncertain how long this will stay usable. It would be sensible to export shared articles while you can using the JSON exports listed below.
Your notes:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/created

Again, no longer directly available, who knows when Google will disable this view. If you really want your notes, it would be sensible to export them while you have the chance (see the information on the JSON formats below).
Your links:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/link
Liked articles:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/like
Stared articles:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/starred
All unread articles:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/fresh
All read articles:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/read
All articles:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/reading-list
Articles with a specific tag:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/label/

is the name of the tag as it appears in your list
All articles in a folder:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/label/_

_ is the name of the tag as it appears in your list. Note that folders and tags are designated in the same way.
All articles in a specific RSS/ATOM feed:

http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/feed/_

_ is the full URL (including the scheme, e.g. http://)
Friends comments (comments on articles you’ve shared):

You can no longer access these at all from the web interface but the URL would have been:

<a href=“http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/broadcast-friends-comments”>http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/broadcast-friends-comments So that’s how to get each of the different types of view in the web interface but what about using these views in other systems such as displaying in a WordPress blog? Well neatly, you can make a simple adjustment to the URL to get an ATOM feed, just replace “view” with “atom” in the URL:

[http://www.google.co.uk/reader/atom/user/<20DigitUserId>/state/com.google/broadcast][1] It is worth noting that the resulting ATOM feed contains tags that define all of the feed types above, read, unread, having a note or comment, liked, shared, starred, tagged or in a folder. The tags take the form:

and so on.
In addition, then entry may also have tags related to the original feed, e.g.

Finally, in addition to having an ATOM feed for parsing with an RSS feed reader, you can also get a JSON formatted feed by replacing the “view” with “export/jas” in the URL’s given above. This gives output in JSON Activity Stream format. This isn’t as rich as Google’s own propriatory JSON format which can be accessed by replacing the “view” with “export/json“. The JSON formats also support some additional, optional parameters in the URL:

filename=

Default file name to save
likes=false
n=99999

Maximum number of entries to include
verb=starred

Not sure what this is. Verbs can be: starred, liked, shared, noted, shared
co=false

Include Comments
hl=en

Output Language [1]: http://www.google.co.uk/reader/atom/user/%3C20DigitUserId%3E/state/com.google/broadcast

Updated Blogs

Julian Knight — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:00:35 +0000

Hi to everyone who has followed this blog and my other blogs (Living With Linux and my Development Blog) for a while. The Living With Linux blog is now redirected to the [Linux][1] category on this blog and the development blog redirected to the [Development][2] category. For a long time I’ve been meaning to consolidate the blogs into a single blog and move the main blog from Blogger to WordPress. Well, that has now happened so welcome to the new, updated blog. There may be one or two missing posts and some missing comments but I will fix that as time allows. I also intend to move back to using Disquss for comments which I think gives a much better reader experience and reach. So hopefully, I’ll be more inclined to make better use of the blog again now and I will be trying to bring together not only the larger posts on this blog but also my short posts on Twitter and Diigo in a more consistent and coherent form. [1]: topics/operating-systems/linux “All posts related to the Linux operating system” [2]: /topics/development “All posts related to development and programming”

Bug in WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types

Julian Knight — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:00:25 +0000

Well this one threw me! I was trying out the new custom post types in WordPress 3.0 RC1 and could not work out why mine wasn’t working even when I copied an example from the web and only changed a few things. It turns out that there is a limitation in the naming of post types – they cannot have a name longer than 20 characters! If you use more than 20 characters, the “Publish” button becomes “Submit for Review” and if you submit, you get the dreaded: Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again.

error.

Hello WordPress! My blogs now combined

Julian Knight — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:39:18 +0000

I’ve moved my several Blogger blogs over to a single WordPress blog as I can take better control. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that some comments may get lost in the move – sorry about that. Anyway, you will now find blog entries about all areas of IT that take my fancy including Windows, Linux, Web & Office development, Identity Management and doubtless lots of other random stuff. My blogs are mainly for me so that I can keep things I’d like to remember (or rant about!) in one place, if it’s useful to you as well, please let me know in the comments. Regards, Julian Knight

New Comments System

Julian Knight — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:50:00 +0000

I’ve moved my comments over to [Disqus][1] from the default Blogger comments. It means that you don’t have to log in to comment and you get much better tracking of discussions. My other blog “[Much Ado About IT][2]” has had this for a while and it seems to work really well.

Unfortunately, it does mean that I’ve lost any existing comments – sorry to those who have commented in the past. [1]: http://disqus.com [2]: http://it.knightnet.org.uk

Quick test of new comments system (using DISQUS)

Julian Knight — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:39:00 +0000

Just testing a new commenting system – Disqus. Looks like it works OK so I’ll keep it online for now. Currently, you no longer need to be logged in (previously you needed to present either a Blogger, Google or OpenID credential to comment because of spam) since Disqus is supposed to handle this better. However, if the spam starts to reappear, I’ll have to restrict it again. For blog authors, check out [Psolonoid][1] as well. It provides an easy and controlable way of creating links (like trackbacks) between blog entries. [1]: http://www.psolonoid.com

What goes here?

Julian Knight — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:59:00 +0000

I’ve already got a few things to blog about so expect some articles shortly covering the following:

Tablet PC’s

I’ve just brought an IBM X61 (on eBay) after much deliberation (we’re talking several years here!). I’ve wanted a Slate (e.g. no keyboard) for ages but they go for silly prices generally. So now I have an X61 to go with the monster 17″ Dell M1710.
Microsoft InfoPath

An XML-based form designer and filler with rich interface options (including Tablet ink support).
Microsoft Groove

A peer-to-peer collaboration tool a bit like a mini SharePoint for workgroups without needing a central server. Update 2009-02-13: Not forgetting:
Microsoft OneNote

The ultra-useful note-taking tool.
Microsoft Windows 7

Doubtless what Windows Vista should have been in the first place!

Welcome

Julian Knight — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:23:00 +0000

Hi, here is my new blog. I’ve been meaning to set up a general IT blog for some time and this is it.

This will be a collection of thoughts, ideas I’ve had and research I’ve done.

You can also look at my [blog about Linux][1] and my [personal homepage][2]. [1]: http://linux.knightnet.org.uk/ [2]: http://www.knightnet.org.uk/