Moved to Tinkerer and OpenShift
Using Hyde for blogging was really too mush manual work to do and when I switched to Hyde I didn’t know about Tinkerer. With Hyde you can do whatever you want and how you want, but you have to do it yourself, nobody else is using the same configuration or layout and you don’t have such a nice JavaScript based search function like in Sphinx.
I’ve learned a lot about Jinja2, the templating s system used in Hyde and Sphinx, I’ve written some extensions, started working with Flask, but now it is time for something new.
So I moved to Tinkerer, which is a static website generator based on Sphinx.
I like Tinkerer because it behaves like Sphinx, and Sphinx is really a great tool for generating documentation and I’m quiet familiar with its reStructuredText syntax.
I had some really annoying downtimes with my old free hosting provider, so it was also time to look for another hosting, I’ve seen some news posts about OpenShift and wanted to try it.
My first impressions about OpenShift:
- It’s nice that I can use Git to manage my web apps.
- I can access my files via sftp:// in my filemanager: sftp://12345678901234567890@blog-chrisj.rhcloud.com/var/lib/stickshift/12345678901234567890/blog/runtime/repo/php/
- I can also use rsync to upload some files.
- It is not so nice that I have to create a snapshot (rhc app snapshot save -a piwik) to commit runtime changes from php apps to the Git repository (no git commit on the server and git pull on my local machine).
- The 3 free Gears of FreeShift are not enough and MegaShift is a bit pricey: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/developers/pricing
- ...
SourceForge’s Project Web is a good addition:
- SFTP, rsync and SSH access
- Apache web server
- PHP and others
- HTTP Basic Authentication
- Custom VHOSTs
- Service usage is not restricted by disk quotas. Update: You can upload files >100MB, but it is not possible to download them via the Apache web server.
- Release large files for download (FRS): It is also possible to upload large files and make them accessible via web, the best thing is that it supports SFTP, so you can sync your files with rsync, see here for some information how to download them with wget: http://sourceforge.net/blog/download-ninja/
- Usable for internal project documentation
In the meantime I’ve also started developing an webapp which is written in Python, based on Flask and Jinja2 on the server side and uses jQuerry and Bootstrap on the client side, but it looks like I have not the time to finish it.
Update:
My first pull request with some modifications to Tinkerer got already merged upstream and I’ve got a really encouraging response:
Vlad Riscutia (vladris) said: Thanks so much Christian! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this contribution - I especially like the way you implemented “Read more...”, at some point I was considering having that but I couldn’t figure out a good solution. Your bug fixes are also more than welcomed! I’ve been very busy at work this past month, that being the reason I didn’t pull this sooner but I definitely appreciate your hard work on this! I will definitely get some time to spend on Tinkerer this week and I will go through the bugs you opened. Thanks again!