Let’s do an experiment! Everyone likes experiments. It’s what separates people who engage in experiments from people who don’t. As they say, there are ten kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those sick of this joke.

If you’ll stop interrupting me, I’d like you to take a look at this word salad. This smorgasbord of syllables.

$COMPANY is the world’s digital infrastructure company® [sic]. Digital leaders harness $COMPANY’s trusted platform to bring together and interconnect foundational infrastructure at software speed. $COMPANY enables organizations to access all the right places, partners and possibilities to scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value, while supporting their sustainability goals.

As an aside, I love that they localised their entire site for Australia, but they retained the US spelling in that blurb. Makes everything else seem a bit like a wasted effort.

Anyway, based on a reading of just that paragraph, what do you think they do? What service do you think they provide? What are you buying? Their landing page also says blockchain, wait no, augmented reality, wait no, AI too, if that helps.

Give up?

They’re a data centre company. They run data centres. Though I think if they were a telco, a dev house, a managed service provider, an OEM, a systems integrator, or a hot dog stand, I’d have still believed it. I could slap it on the website of the company I work for, and it’d still work.

Marketing being outsourced to chatbots was perhaps inevitable, but I’m surprised a billion dollar company would let one loose on their landing page copy. Maybe I don’t understand because I don’t think at “software speed”. I wonder how you quantify that?

Sorry sir, you’ll have to forgive Ruben, he only operates at seventeen softwares a second.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-23.

This always trips me up, so I’m putting it here for posterity. It assumes you’re running Ghost, and proxying it through (free)nginx.

First, install and configure Ghost as though its running on localhost. I do this in its own FreeBSD jail, and with a ghost user, so node doesn’t spray stuff everywhere.

Then, as per the Ghost Developer docs, add the following to your nginx config. This assumes the default Ghost port:

server {
    ## Your virtual host URL
    server_name example.com;
        
    ## Optional: Stop Ghost advertising this
    proxy_hide_header X-Powered-By;
        
    ## Proxy requests to Ghost
    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
            
        ## Your Jail URL and port
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368;
    }
}

Then change your URL and restart Ghost:

$ ghost config url https://example.com/
$ ghost restart

Ghost also has ghost setup nginx and ghost setup ssl for Let’s Encrypt and web server config, but I prefer to do these manually on my existing proxy.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-23.

This is just a short post to remind everyone that PmWiki is excellent, and you should consider it. I’ve been running a local install of it for my own note-taking uses for two decades, and I recently flipped another public MediaWiki install to it… ours!

I maintain, and have maintained, a bunch of CMSs and wiki systems for various people, including DokuWiki, Moin, and TWiki, along with MediaWiki and its various offshoots. PmWiki is by far the easiest, both to use and operate. It’s tiny, it’s written in bog standard PHP you can deliver with php-fpm, and its markup is easy to grok.

I’m at the point now where I default to PmWiki unless someone has a specific feature they need from something heavier. This rarely happens in practice.

Clara and I wrote a stylesheet to make it look a bit more like MediaWiki, but otherwise we run it stock. If you do decide to give it a try, don’t forget to donate.

Huge thanks to Patrick R. Michaud and Petko Yotov :). Your software is one of the regular highlights of my day.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-04-22.