w/e 2022-12-04
After last week’s fun and games of launching ooh.directory this week was less fun and no games. I spent some time making changes to the code for my personal website, on which you’re reading these very words, in preparation for moving it from Heroku to the VPS on which ooh.directory runs.
Changing the code went fine. For example, removing Whitenoise (I’d be using nginx to serve static files), and adding django-q2 in place of Heroku Scheduler for all the background tasks.
Setting up the site on the VPS started off OK, following my detailed instructions from last time but, like a male Tory MP, it soon became predictably and tiresomly problematic.
My nginx skills could not be classed as skills on any CV and so I hit problems trying to serve some static HTML pages and files from /, as well as Django (which Whitenoise used to handle simply). With help from Stack Overflow and Mastodon I eventually got that working.
Next morning I discovered that, while it “worked for me” (Safari’s cache on all my devices I guess?), the site was stuck in a redirect loop and entirely inaccessible. Some more tweaks fixed that but also… the extra load on the server of my stupidly sprawling personal website was, I assume, too much and so the task on ooh.directory that fetches all the blogs’ feeds kept running out of RAM, and taking the database down with it. I may not know much about servers but this seems suboptimal.
I guess one problem with hosting your site with a nice company with sane working hours is waiting for them to upgrade your server, which is what I spent Saturday doing. It got done around 5am on Sunday morning when the unlucky on-call person presumably got woken up by my site going down again.
I don’t know about you, but my mood is very affected by the state of the technology that surrounds me. If my laptop or phone is playing up in some way I’m frustrated or glum until it’s resolved. And the same with my websites, with the added embarrassment of the problem being more public.
This is exactly the kind of frustration I’ve avoided so far by hosting on the more expensive Heroku. And so my agonising over how to host a website in 2022 has not disappeared by having made a decision. I still hope to move Pepys’ Diary before the end of the year. Unsubscribe now.
§ Understandably, my fantasies of turning everything off and spending the rest of my life reading books and listening to music have been strong.
The only other events of the week:
- Having a nice coffee at our favourite Hereford coffee shop / cafe / restaurant – Sensory & Rye – our first since it moved to a much larger space.
- Doing about half a day of client work. A whole half day!
- Planting 190 daffodil and tulip bulbs along the verges outside the house.
§ We finished enjoying all three series of Rev. (on iPlayer) which I’d overlooked when it was on telly (2010–2014), writing it off as the kind of mainstream sitcom I’m not interested in. At my sister’s urging we gave it a go and it was lovely and I’m sad to have finished it. It’s funny and touching, and Olivia Colman and Simon McBurney had arrays of very fine expressions.
We also finished the fourth season of Snowfall (also on iPlayer) which continues to be good. I mean, not so good that we didn’t realise we hadn’t seen the fourth season until half-way through watching a recap of it, as preparation for watching season five, but good enough. It is frequently like watching, and listening to, a GTA TV series.
§ That is, you’ll be glad to hear, all for now.