Thomas Leavitt's Personal Blog

A blog about nothing and everything.

Linux Tools

November 24, 2024 — Thomas Van Ness Leavitt

Some of the tools I use to manage / operate this site and server (and others). Will be updated as I think of things to add.

The server this run on is a minimal DigitalOcean "droplet" running i Ubuntu Linux . $4/mo.

Secure Shell (ssh) is great (vast improvement, security-wise, on telnet, which is what I started my career with), Mosh improves it considerably.

The web server running on this system is Apache (nothing exotic), was the easiest to get PHP running on (used with another project hosted on this server, www.gospelofthomas.net.

My shell environment is "bash". Default. I have and do use other shells, such as "ksh" (what I started with on Sun Solaris) and "zsh" (what I use on my desktop, an iMac running MacOS).

Tags: tools, linux, bash, apache, mosh, digitalocean, ubuntu

Simple Content Management Tools

November 24, 2024 — Thomas Van Ness Leavitt

As a command line, text editor oriented techie, I favor tools that require a minimum of infrastructure, complexity, overhead. For instance, when I create a Wiki, I use DokuWikiwhen I want to create a wiki (did this for a gaming clan I was running a while ago).

"DokuWiki is a simple to use and highly versatile Open Source wiki software that doesn't require a database. It is loved by users for its clean and readable syntax. The ease of maintenance, backup and integration makes it an administrator's favorite."

I'm a vi fan (actually, these days, it's vim or gvim [built in GUI]), have been using it ever since I encountered the vilearn tutorial at Cabrillo College (the local junior college) back in 1993, when I was hanging out with a friend as he installed a VAX running BSD (the original UC Berkeley version) that had been donated to the campus by UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz).

All this is by way of saying, when I started looking around for tools to manage a blog a few years back, I wanted something much less complicated than typical CMS / blog systems like WordPress (which requires an SQL database on the backend, and constant maintenance and updates to avoid being hacked). I looked around, and found the software being used to create this blog, Bash Blog. From the programmer:

"I wanted a very, very simple way to post entries to a blog by using a public folder on my server, without any special requirements and dependencies."

Perfect!

Tags: dokuwiki, bash-blog, vi, vim, gvim, history, tools