Lee

Custom Twitter URL shortening and image uploading

I don’t know what normal people do on days off from work, but I do things that are too esoteric even to write about for Ars Technica because…because I think there’s something wrong with me. So, last Friday I spent a few hours setting up a vanity URL shortening service and custom image uploading service for Twitter, so I can, I don’t know, be cooler than everyone else. It was surprisingly fun!

First, though, the annoying caveat: Twitter already shortens every link with its t.co service, and you can’t opt out. The reasons they give are mostly marginal and downplay the fact that aggregate clicking behavior has a substantial dollar value attached to it, but there you go. Still, it’s totally cool to have your own link shortening—you just get to have your links double-shorted when they’re posted inside of tweets.

Link shortening works best with a cool short domain, and I desperately wanted bigdi.no as mine. Unfortunately, to register a domain in the .no TLD requires an actual business presence in Norway, so that was out. I settled on registering bigsaur.us instead, which is only two letters longer.

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Working on a new comment system

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In the previous post, I walked through setting up Discourse, a Ruby-based web forum. I’m in the process of shifting this blog’s comment system from Disqus, which I’ve never been wholly comfortable with, over to using Discourse instead. There is being done via a plug-in for Octopress currently under development by one of the posters over at the main Discourse development forum.

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Setting up Discourse with Passenger and Nginx

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Hi there, visitors from Google! The procedure outlined here will work to get Discourse up and running, but you are way, way better off following the official Discourse installation guide and utilizing the Discourse Docker image. Proceed below at your own risk!

I like fiddling with new software and seeing if I can make it work—that’s what most of this blog is about, in fact. Most of the web-based apps I’ve walked through deploying have been written with PHP, but there’s a fancy new bit of Ruby-based forum software that I’ve sort of fallen in love with: Discourse.

Discourse is shiny and new, and the developers (including Jeff Atwood, one of the folks behing StackExchange). It’s made out of Ruby instead of PHP, and it uses PostgreSQL and Redis for its back-end. The project is still very, very beta; there are multiple methods of deploying it and it has a robust development environment that you can set up and start hacking away on.

This doesn’t matter much to me, though—I dont’ code. I just wanted to set it up and play with it. So, this is a walkthrough on how to deploy Discourse on Ubuntu, using Nginx and Phusion Passenger. If you want to see the end result, check out my Discourse test forum—when we’re done, you’ll have something similar up and running.

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Node.js, Redis, and Etherpad

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Etherpad Lite is a real-time collaborative text editor which allows multiple users to simultaneously fiddle with a document. Everyone can see everyone else’s changes in real time, which is really cool. The “lite” tag after the name is there because the Etherpad Lite project was spawned from the ashes of the original Etherpad project, which itself was snapped up by Google and transformed into the ill-fated Google Wave. Wave was never really all that popular and has since been killed, but the core idea is still totally cool—to present a document to more than one user and have all users be able to make changes to it, and to have those changes shown to all other users as they’re made. It’s a surprisingly complex problem to solve. For one thing, it’s entirely possible that more than one user can change the same thing at the same time; there has to be a way of telling who “wins” and whose changes are tossed out. Even more complex is figuring out a way to track all the changes and organize them, and then display them for everyone.

The original Etherpad project solved this with a full mix of heavy web technologies, requiring you to install Java, Scala, and MySQL; it utilized no small amount of server resources and was difficult to scale. Etherpad Lite jettisons a lot of its predecessor’s bulk and does things in a much more web two-point-oh fashion. Specifically, Etherpad Lite runs on Node.js, a server-side Javascript engine which can be used for lots and lots of fancy things—Node is really deserving of its own blog entry, and we’re using only a tiny subset of its features here. Etherpad Lite also needs a database to hold the documents and store changes; out of the box it can use MySQL, but in this post we’re going to take things even further and configure it to run on Redis, an extremely fast memory-based key-value store. Finally, we’ll do a tiny bit of hacking on Etherpad’s HTML to force it to display a list of all the “pads” (documents) currently in its database.

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Platforms and value judgments

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My name is Lee, and I am a Mac user.

There, I said it. I’m a dirty, dirty Mac user, and I’m okay with that.

My intent with this blog was for it to remain purely technical, with no personal entries at all; I’ve been down that road before with my last blog and it didn’t end well. However, an article went up this past weekend on Ars where the staff posted pictures of their office desks, and the amount of herpderping in the article’s comments about the mostly-Mac setups was boggling. Maybe it struck me so hard because I consciously avoid platform flame war discussions, having taken part in more than my share in the 80s and 90s; whatever the reason, some of the shit bubbling up to the surface in that article’s discussion thread just blows my mind.

The computing platform you start with might say something about your economic status (can’t afford a Mac, gotta use a hand-me-down Packard Bell!) or your computing ability (“I’ve got a Dell!” “What model?” “….Dell!”), and the computing platform you choose might say something about your goals and preferences (“GONNA DRIVE THE FRAG TRAIN TO TEAMKILL TOWN WITH MY FIFTEEN GRAPHICS CARDS!”), but judging someone’s intelligence and worth as a human being based on whether they’re using a home-built Windows 7 PC or a Mac is ludicrous. I’ve built more PCs from parts in the past quarter-century than any hate-spewing MACS SUCK noob on any discussion board you’d care to name, and yet the computers I use most often throughout any given day have an Apple logo on them.

Things weren’t always thus.

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Adventures in Varnish

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In the previous entry, I touched briefly on how some experimentation with Blitz.io led to me installing Varnish Cache on the Bigdino web server. Varnish Cache is a fast and powerful web accelerator, which works by caching your web site’s content (html and css files, javascript files, images, font files, and whatever else you got) in RAM. It differs from other key-based web cache solutions (like memcache) by not attempting to reinvent the wheel with respect to storing and accessing its cache contents; rather than potentially arguing with its host server’s OS and virtual memory subsystem on what gets to live in RAM and what gets paged out to disk, Varnish Cache relies wholly on the host’s virtual memory subsystem for handling where its cache contents live.

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Blitz.io makes load testing fun

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Web site performance has been on my mind a lot lately. An average day for this blog means serving only a few hundred visitors and maybe 4-500 page views, but bigdinosaur.org also hosts the Chronicles of George, which carries with it a much higher average load; on days when a link hits Reddit or a popular Facebook page, the CoG can clock 10-12,000 pageviews. This is still small potatoes compared to a truly popular site, but it pays to be prepared for anything and everything. Setting up a web server to be as fast as possible is good practice for the day it gets linked to from Daring Fireball or Slashdot, and even if that day never comes, there’s nothing wrong with having an efficient and powerful setup which can dish out a huge amount of both static and dynamic content.

So in the course of some casual perusing for Nginx optimizations, I happened across Blitz.io, a Heroku-based site which gives you the ability to load-test your web server. I was immediately intrigued; I’ve done load testing on my LAN before using Siege and Apachebench; LAN-based testing is useful to a point, but it won’t help you to understand the over-the-net performance of your web site. Blitz.io fills a gaping hole in web site testing, letting you observe how your site reacts under load in real-world conditions. I was intrigued and I signed up, and I ended up killing several hours with testing, mitigation, and re-testing. The results were unexpected and incredibly valuable.

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If This Then That dot com

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Brandon Mathis, the creator and maintainer of Octopress, recently tweeted a method to programmatically create tweets from new Octopress blog posts. Moments after that, he retweeted a reponse from another Octopress user which outlined a simpler method using ifttt.com, a web site which lets you create automated actions based on conditions.

The site’s name is pronounced like “lift” but without the “l”, as it they proclaim on their homepage. The awkward construction comes from “if this then that”, which describes the web site’s purpose: if a thing happens, then do something.

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Vanilla forums on Nginx

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A few years ago I created a web site called the Chronicles of George, featuring some badly-written help desk tickets from the job I had at the time. It gained me some small amount of Internet fame (but no fortune), and developed a loyal community of sympathizers. For a long time we hung out on a self-hosted phpbb forum, but a change in web hosting led to the opportunity to also change the forum software away from something as hack-prone and complex as phpbb to something faster, simpler, and ostensibly more secure: Vanilla.

Out of the box, Vanilla operates a bit differently from a traditional thread-based forum like phpbb. It is a discussion-focused forum, deprioritizing standard categorical organization in favor of bringing the things being talked about to the forefront. This has advantages in some forum models, like a support forum for a specific product or service, where the first thing a reader wants to see is discussion, not a choice of categories, but it’s not necessarily what most folks are used to seeing out of a web forum. Fortunately, Vanilla also offers configuration options to make it behave more like a “standard” web forum.

Why choose it, then, if we’re just going to override its most distinguishing characteristic? Because, as mentioned in the opening paragraph, it’s light and fast and secure. Additionally, the 2.1 branch (currently under development and downloadable here) comes with an absolutely killer theme that we can easily customize and prettify with some quick CSS.

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Wordpress on Nginx

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Wordpress is the Microsoft Word of blogging platforms—it’s overkill for almost everyone, but everyone uses it anyway. It’s a popular, monstrous, ugly app that requires regular patching to keep evildoers from doing evil with it, but it’s still a top choice for self-hosted blogging because if you can fight your way through its ridiculously complex interface, you can use it to make a good-looking blog without having to know a lot about HTML or CSS.

Our blogging platform here at the Bigdino compoud is obviously Octopress—which you’re reading right now—but I had occasion to stand up a Wordpress blog recently and wanted to share what I learned doing it. Wordpress’s ubiquity means that there are a million-billion-trillion guides out there for getting it working; however, the vast majority of them focus on how to make it work with Apache, not Nginx. What I hope differentiates this post is that I’m going to focus on taking common .htaccess-based security practices and turning them into Nginx-specific location directives and rules.

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