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A few things to report about Oracle Security after we have had a short break for familly holidays and also because of a lot of work being done over the last few months. It is nice to be busy in....[Read More]
Posted by Pete On 02/09/10 At 02:27 PM
Lindsay blogged about the recent data breach report from Verizon last week. Alex Hutton, one of the authors has just re-tweeted DennisF's tweet that he has done a podcast about the data breach report . Enjoy! EDITED: I incorrectly added....[Read More]
Posted by Pete On 16/08/10 At 07:46 PM
This blog was hosted for several years on wordpress.com as it was the easiest way to host a blog when I started. But recently I was not very satisfied with it because of the following reasons:
When I do web app development then I use TextMate for HTML / CSS and Ruby editing (sometime I use CSSEdit when I need to do more CSS editing), I use Textile for wiki-style content editing in my apps, I use git for version control, I use Ruby rake for build and deployment tasks. Wouldn’t it be great if I could use the same toolset for writing my blog?
I had heard about Jekyll blogging tool several times and now I decided that it is the time to start to use it. Jekyll was exactly matching my needs:
So it sounds quite easy and cool therefore I started migration.
I started my new blog repository using canonical example site from Jekyll’s creator. You just need to remove posts from _posts directory and start to create your own.
At first I needed to export all my existing posts from wordpress.com. I found helpful script which processes wordpress.com export and creates Textile source files for Jekyll as well as comments import file for Disqus (more about that later). It did quite good job but I needed anyway to go manually through all posts to do the following changes:
images directory.As I wanted to create more simple and maintainable CSS stylesheets I didn’t just copy previous CSS files but manually picked just the parts I needed. And now as I had full control over CSS I spent a lot of time improving my previous design (font sizes, margins, paddings etc.) – but now at least I am more satisfied with it :)
As all final generated pages are static there is no standard way how to do typical dynamic pages like list of posts with selected tag. But the good thing is that I can create rake tasks that can re-generate all dynamic pages as static pages whenever I do some changes to original posts. I found some examples that I used to create my rake tasks for tag pages and tag cloud generation.
Previously wordpress.com was showing some automatically generated related posts for each post. Initially it was not quite obvious how to do it (as site.related_posts was always showing the latest posts). Then I found that I need to turn on lsi option and in addition install GSL library (I installed it with homebrew) and RubyGSL (as otherwise related posts generation was very slow).
The next issue is that in static HTML site you cannot store comments and you need to use some hosted commenting system. The most frequently commenting system in Jekyll sites is Disqus and therefore I decided to use it as well. It took some time to understand how it works but it provides all necessary HTML snippets that you need to include in your layout templates and then it just works.
Previously mentioned script also included possibility to import my existing comments from wordpress.com into Disqus. But that was not quite as easy as I hoped:
So be prepared that you will need to import and then delete imported comments several times :)
If you have existing subscribers to your RSS or Atom feed then you either need to use the same URL for new feed as well or to redirect it to the new feed URL. In my case I created new Feedburner feed and redirected old feed URL to the new one in .htaccess file.
In my case I renamed categories to tags in my blog posts and URLs but as these old category URLs were indexed by Google and were showing on to Google search results I redirected them as well in .htaccess file.
If you want to allow search in your blog then the easiest way is just to add Google search box with sitesearch parameter.
Previously I used standard wordpress.com analytics pages to review statistics, now I added Google Analytics for that purpose.
Finally after all migration tasks I was ready to deploy my blog into production. As I had account at Dreamhost I decided that it is good enough for static HTML hosting.
I created rake tasks for deployment that use rsync for file transfer and now I can just do rake deploy to generate the latest version of site and transfer it to hosting server.
After that I needed to remap DNS name of blog.rayapps.com to new location and wait for several hours until this change propogated over Internet.
When I was doing regular HTML re-generation using jekyll I noticed that it started to get quite slow. After investigation I found out that the majority of time went on Pygments execution for code highlighting. To fix this issue I found jekyll patches that implemented Pygments results caching and I added it as ‘monkey patch’ to my repository (it stores cached results in _cache directory). After this patch my HTML re-generation happens instantly.
I published ‘source code’ of my blog on GitHub so you can use it as example if I convinced you to migrate to Jekyll as well :)
The whole process took several days but now I am happy with my new “geek blogging platform” and can recommend it to others as well.
If you are in or around the Czech Republic and interested in ADF/Fusion/Java development then Oracle University is running and ADF Training day. I will be delivering the training which covers ADF, Fusion and JDeveloper with loads of demos to show how you can use ADF to build Fusion applications.
Details can be found as part of this Seminar series.
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