Tombuntu

Migrating Tombuntu from WordPress to Hugo

Sun, 10 May 2020 23:15:39 -0700

Back in 2018, I silently upgraded this site to “Tombuntu 3.” To reduce hosting costs and maintenance, I migrated from WordPress to Hugo, a static site generator. Here’s a (belated) overview of the process.

Exporting posts

I had almost five hundred old posts that needed to be migrated from an exported WordPress XML file to Markdown files. There are off-the-shelf solutions for this, but I knew there would be complications. I ended up doing the migration myself, with a Python script.

WordPress’s XML file contains HTML, but lacking paragraph tags. I used this implementation of WordPress’s autop function to add them in.

I wrote my old posts in WordPress’ visual editor. It produced HTML that looked fine at the time, but wasn’t semantic. For example, I often created headings with a bold single-line paragraph. To fix these issues, I came up with simple heuristics to find them, and implemented regular expression substitutions to fix the HTML.

Finally, I used Pandoc, a document converter tool, to convert the HTML into Markdown files suitable for Hugo. These files also include important metadata such as each post’s original URL and RSS GUID from WordPress.

Exporting comments

Tombuntu no longer accepts comments. I preserved historical comments by appending them to the content of each post in a special “archived comments” section. Feel free to send me your comments via email using the button at the end of each post.

Deploying

I work on Tombuntu from a Git repository on my workstation. To deploy the site to its web server, I wrote an Ansible playbook that uses the synchronize module to efficiently upload changes. I also use Ansible to configure the server.

Results

Tombuntu 3 runs with room to space on a cheap virtual server and has been easy to maintain so far. Hugo works well, although I had to work around a bug in its “shortcodes” feature. This month I also upgraded the server to Ubuntu 20.04 and added HTTPS support using a free Let’s Encrypt certificate.

I’m still using Ubuntu at home and work every day. Maybe I’ll find something to write about other than this site itself sometime!

Upgrading Tombuntu in 2013

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 23:23:24 +0000

Last week Tombuntu’s server received a much-needed upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04. Tombuntu launched in 2007 hosted on my home server running Ubuntu. In 2008, I moved it to a Linode VPS running Ubuntu 8.04. Support for Ubuntu 8.04 ended back in April, so it was definitely time for an upgrade.

Other than some security issues, I haven’t had any problems with Linode, so I re-provisioned by existing server with a new Ubuntu 12.04 install. Here’s a brief overview of the setup process I went though:

Linode’s Ubuntu image requires some extra configuration that you would normally do during an Ubuntu install. Follow Linode’s documentation to set the hostname, set the timezone, and create a user.
Configure the SSH server to use a non-standard port (to reduce brute-force attempts), disable root login, and disable password authentication.
Create a directory for document roots. I’m the only person who needs to log into the server, so I just create directories like /srv/www/tombuntu.com for each domain that are owned by my user.
Install Nginx and add configuration for each domain in /etc/nginx/sites-available.
Install php5-fpm.
Install MySQL, run mysql_secure_installation, and create users and databases for each application.
Install Postfix with no relay host so the server can send notifications.
Write a cron job on my home desktop to create database dumps and back everything up using rdiff-backup.

The software stack has only changed slightly: Nginx has replaced the Apache web server. I used to have problems with the number of Apache processes and their memory usage inflating and running the server out of memory. Nginx uses a event-driven architecture so one process/thread can handle multiple connections asynchronously, whereas Apache (in the most common configuration) requires one process for each connection. This makes Nginx more scalable and keeps memory usage consistent.

My favorite way to backup is still rdiff-backup, because it allows remote, incremental backups, and restoring from the most recent backup only requires copying files. My desktop at home initiates the server backup through cron. This has the advantage that the server does not have direct access to its backups (my desktop can reach the server via SSH, but not the other way around).

Tombuntu is powered by WordPress. Between upgrading to the latest version and having to run SQL queries to delete massive amounts of spam, WordPress is pretty high-maintenance. It’s also really slow without caching pages on the server. For whatever reason, WordPress doesn’t include a built-in page cache, but there are numerous plugins providing this. Unfortunately, many of the popular plugins are now buggy, poorly maintained, and/or are trying to upsell you to a premium version. Currently I’ve settled on Hyper Cache.

Finally, I did some optimization on the site itself to improve load time. The FeedBurner widgets were slow and didn’t seem to work any more, so I removed them. I used Google’s excellent PageSpeed Insights tool to get some additional suggestions for speeding things up.

Setting up Ubuntu on an SSD

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:44:01 +0000

I recently purchased a new solid state drive (SSD) to replace my current hard drive (HDD). Since SSDs work so much differently than HDDs, it’s worth while to make some optimizations in Ubuntu for them. SSDs are much faster than HDDs, but have a limited number of writes before they wear out. This makes balancing performance with the life of your SSD also a big concern for how you tune your system.

I’ve written a post on this topic before for the older SSD in my netbook.

Partitioning and bind mounts

I partitioned my 60 GB SSD into a 10 GB / partition, and a 50 GB /home partition, both using the default ext4 filesystem. I kept my old HDD home partition mounted at /media/oldhome.

I wanted to put some of my large and infrequently accessed files, like virtual machines and videos, on the more spacious HDD. I also wanted to make accessing these files from my home directory seamless. One way to do this would be to symlink folders from the SSD to the HDD. However, I found that this wouldn’t be fully seamless for some applications that don’t follow symlinks.

Bind mounts are a better solution. They allow a directory in a filesystem to be mounted in additional locations, similarly to symlinks but fully transparent to applications. To test bind mounting my videos directory, I ran mount with the bind option, and specified the source directory (on the HDD), and the mount point (which must already exist):

mount --bind /media/oldhome/tom/Videos /home/tom/Videos

To make my bind mounts permanent, I added them to my /etc/fstab file in this format:

/media/oldhome/tom/Videos /home/tom/Videos none bind 0 0

If you need to add a path with a space in it, replace the space with \040 to escape it. If you make a mistake and one of the bind mounts fails, Ubuntu will allow you to skip it and continue booting. So far the bind mount approach seems to work perfectly.

Mount options for SSDs

Any recent SSD should have the TRIM command available, which prevents performance degradation by allowing the OS to notify the SSD of which blocks are unused. The ext4 filesystem uses TRIM when the discard option is set.

The noatime option reduces writes to the SSD by not writing access time updates whenever a file is read. This improves performance and increases the life of the SSD.

I set these two mount options though /etc/fstab for both my SSD partitions by adding discard and noatime to the list of options for / and /home like this:

UUID=193af662-d7a0-47fb-b3f7-141ae3d19227 / ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime,discard 0 1

Disk head scheduler for SSDs

A disk scheduler optimizes the order of disk requests by considering the position of the hard drive’s read/write head. An SSD needs no such optimization, so it’s best to use the noop (no-operation) scheduler.

I switched to the noop scheduler for my SSD by adding the to following line to /etc/rc.local (replace sdb with your own SSD’s device node name):

echo noop > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler

Swap and swappiness

I kept my swap partition on the old HDD. Swap on the SSD would be faster, but would also shorten the SSD’s life.

My system has plenty of memory, so I also reduced the swappiness value to 0 to tell Ubuntu to only swap when absolutely necessary. I did this by adding the line vm.swappiness=0 to /etc/sysctl.conf.

Even more

There are many more ways to tune Ubuntu for SSDs. A few things I haven’t done are: partition alignment (Ubuntu’s partitioner now seems to take care of this automatically), disabling journalling (I’d prefer reliability over slightly reduced SSD life), and mounting /tmp or browser cache in memory (I’d prefer to save the memory). The Arch Linux Wiki has a comprehensive page on SSDs, and here’s another article that goes more in-depth in some of the things I mentioned here.

GNOME 3.2 and GNOME Shell Extensions

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:14:32 +0000

GNOME has launched an alpha of the GNOME Shell Extensions website. Like Firefox, GNOME Shell allows extensions to modify and extend the user interface. The site allows you to browse and install extensions written by third parties, but reviewed by GNOME before being made available. There are already many extensions to bring back elements of GNOME 2.

To try GNOME Shell Extensions, you’ll need to be running GNOME 3.2. Ubuntu 11.10 only has GNOME 3.0, but the GNOME3 Team PPA provides packages to update it. I added this PPA on my netbook to updatemy existing GNOME Shell installation in Ubuntu 11.10.

Extensions are installed using a plugin, included with GNOME, that currently only works with Firefox. When it’s working, an extension’s page has a large switch to enable and disable the extension. Flip the switch, select Install in the confirmation dialog, and the extension almost immediately activates. Disabling an extension is just as easy. Here’s the Applications Menu extension in action:

I’d like to see an extension that maximizes screen space on my netbook by hiding the title bar of maximized windows like Unity does.

Could GNOME Shell extensions become a killer feature for GNOME 3?

Even More Graphical Git Clients

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:21:06 +0000

Since my last post about finding a graphical Git client for Ubuntu, I’ve been using the excellent gitg. But here’s four more that I’ve come across since then, most recommended by comments on the previous post:

qgit, as the name suggests, uses the QT GUI toolkit. qgit is a gitk-style interface for viewing revisions. Before you can see uncommitted changes, you’ll have to open Edit->Settings->Working dir->Diff against working dir. There is committing support, but with a very basic interface. In the Actions menu, you can define custom actions to run other git commands and see their output.
SmartGIT is a very advanced Git interface that is closed source but free for non-commercial use. I wanted to try this out, but it refuses to run without the Sun/Oracle Java runtime. I didn’t feel like disturbing my OpenJDK installation, and in Ubuntu 11.10 Sun/Oracle Java is no longer supported at all. From the screenshots though, it looks very comprehensive.
Geany is a simple IDE similar to Gedit. The geany-plugins package in Ubuntu provides GeanyVC, a basic version control plugin for Geany supporting six different VCSs. Once the plugin is enabled, the Tools->VC menu provides simple actions for the current file, directory, and base directory of the repository. The interface is very minimal; viewing any information like the log will open a new document containing raw output from git.
RabbitVCS provides a set of tools for working with both Git and Subversion. Nautilus file browser and Gedit integration are provided, as well as dialogs for Git actions. I haven’t tested RabbitVCS yet, and the version in the Ubuntu repositories doesn’t support Git. However, instructions and a PPA are available for installing the latest version.

Shutter 0.88 Screenshot Tool Released

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:15:04 +0000

The screenshot tool Shutter has been updated to version 0.88, adding upload support for many more services, including Dropbox. Shutter offers advanced screen capture modes, a built in image editor, image editing plugins, and the new upload plugins.

The new upload plugins seem to be very well implemented. To upload to Dropbox for the first time, all I needed to be was click a button in my browser to authorize Shutter’s access to my Dropbox account.

I’ve had Shutter installed for a while, but I haven’t been using it much. However, after taking another look I seem to have solved all my problems with it:

It’s not obvious how to resize an image, but it can be done with Shutter. Right click on an image, select Run a Plugin, select Resize, and click Run.
By default Shutter likes to run in the background rather than quitting. Stop this by opening Edit->Preferences->Behavior and uncheck Minimize to tray when closing main window.
By default Shutter will save every image you capture. To stop it from littering your home directory with files you don’t want, open Edit->Preferences->Main and select Do not save file automatically.

Ubuntu 11.10 and 11.04 both have an older version of Shutter in their repositories. To get version 0.88 with the new upload plugins, you’ll need to follow the directions to add the official Shutter PPA.

Graphical Git Clients for Ubuntu

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 05:31:06 +0000

Command line Git can pale in comparison to fancy web interfaces like GitHub and Bitbucket. Using these sites lead me to look at some of the graphical Git clients available in Ubuntu. I’m far from a Git expert, and I haven’t spend much time playing with these yet, but here’s what I found:

git gui is one of the two official graphical tools available for git. It lets you create commits by staging changes and writing a commit message. There are many more features for remote repositories and branches. The major downside is that the UI and fonts look awful. (Ubuntu package git-gui)
gitk, the other official tool, allows viewing a repository through the commit log. Selecting a commit shows its details, including diffs for all or a selected file. gitk has the same awful UI as git gui. (Ubuntu package gitk)
Giggle has a browse view for viewing the repository tree and selecting files to see what commits affected each file and how. The history view is similar to gitk, but with a nice graph view column showing branching and merging. (Ubuntu package giggle)
Git Cola is a tool similar to git gui for committing and pushing changes. There are buttons for common actions like staging files, pulling, and pushing, as well as an area to write new commit messages. (Ubuntu package git-cola)
gitg can both view repositories and make new commits. Its history tab is similar to both gitk and Giggle, but also has graphs showing the amount of changes made to files and a tree view similar to Giggle’s. The commit tab is similar to git gui, but doesn’t have as many advanced features for branches or remote repositories. (Ubuntu package gitg)

gitg is the most promising tool for my purposes. It combines both gitk and git gui-style interfaces in one program. I wish it it had an easy way to push to a remote repository - and there’s only a fetch button that’s tucked away in the File->Repository Properties dialog. [Update It’s possible to push after all: right clicking on a branch label in the commit log will show more actions. The branch labels can also be drag-and-dropped on each other.]

Watch YouTube Videos Using VLC

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:54:47 +0000

My Eee PC 901 is more than powerful enough to play back 480p video, but not when it’s playing though Adobe Flash Player. 408p YouTube videos drop frames and don’t play back at full framerate. YouTube has an experimental HTML5 video player that should offer better better performance than Flash. I enabled it, but it seems that very few videos support it because advertising will cause a fallback to Flash.

VLC media player supports network streaming from a YouTube. Select Media->Open Network Stream, paste a YouTube URL, and click Play. This seems to work for any YouTube video, and plays back noticeably smoother than Flash on my netbook.

VLC isn’t a perfect solution. First, there’s the inconvenience of copying and pasting a URL for each video. Second, there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the resolution (but it defaults to 480p, which happens to be what I want). Third, VLC doesn’t seem to handle buffering as well as Flash does. While YouTube can play continuously, VLC sometimes has to stop and buffer more video. Selecting Show more options and increasing the cache size to something like 20000 ms seems to help a bit.

I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.10’s VLC for this. While Ubuntu 11.04’s VLC seems to support YouTube, I’ve only been getting VLC can't recognize the input's format errors with this version.

LaTeX Editor Gummi 0.6.0 Released

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 01:23:42 +0000

I’ve been doing lots of document editing with LaTeX lately, so I was happy to see that a new version of my favorite LaTeX editor has been released. Gummi 0.6.0 adds many requested features. I’ve been looking forward most to continuous scrolling in the preview pane, but there’s now also tabbed editing, project support, and more compilation options.

It would be nice if the spell checker would skip LaTeX commands. It looks like this issue is being worked on, but is waiting for a patch in the underlying spell-check library. I’ve also noticed that if you’re selecting text while the preview refreshes, the selection gets stuck (bug report).

Ubuntu packages for Gummi are available from the Gummi PPA.

Automatic Indentation Detection in gedit

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:40:42 +0000

Whether you prefer indenting code with tabs or spaces, the last thing you want to do is mix both styles in one file. The gedit text editor lets you specify what to insert when you press tab, but if you’re jumping between files in different languages or written by different people, you must remember to check the settings each time you open a file.

gedit-autotab is a plugin for gedit that solves this problem by automatically changing the indentation settings to match the style detected in each file. The plugin works with gedit 2 (Ubuntu 11.04), and there’s a forked version available for gedit 3 (Ubuntu 11.10).

For gedit 2 / Ubuntu 11.04: Download this archive file and open it. Put the autotab.py and autotab.gedit-plugin files in ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins (create the plugins folder if it doesn’t exist).

For gedit 3 / Ubuntu 11.10: Download the archive file from this page and open it. Put the autotab.py and autotab.plugin files in ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins (create the gedit/plugins folder if it doesn’t exist).

Finally, open Edit->Preferences->Plugins, and select Auto Tab to activate the plugin. You will get a new item on the status bar showing the current indentation style, which will change depending on the files you open.