Technical Posts

After installing python you should install virtualenv which will allow you to have different python environments with different dependencies without package version conflicts. Once activated the virtual environment is available globally until deactivated. 1. Create New Virtual Environment Consider creating a directory to store all your different python environments or associate the python virtual environment within a specific project folder of something that you are working on. Use the following command (once) to create the virtual python env (and folder) in your current working directory ...

In a previous post Hosting a blog using Hugo and Github, I explained how to use Hugo to create a blogging website and host it on Github. In this post we will look at how to configure Github to serve your website using your own domain. Configure Your Pages Repository I explained how to organise your Hugo blog/website into two repos; one for the entire website project and the other for the /public folder which represents your website. Let’s call this second repo the “public website” repo. ...

Sysadmins (and lesser mortals) use cron to schedule regular jobs on servers for all sorts of tasks including backups. Since it can be a pain to log into each server to ensure that these scheduled jobs are running correctly days, weeks or even months after the jobs were first created, you can opt to receive notifications of the success or failure of these jobs by email. In order to send emails, cron relies on sendmail. In the past, sendmail was pre-installed on (Linux) servers. Nowadays, it is not generally installed and postfix is used instead. If you don’t have postfix running locally or you need to route your emails through an alternate relay then the following information should be helpful for you. ...

They say that fashion trends come and go in cycles before returning again at some point in the future. You could argue that the same is also true for websites and the technology used to build them. In the 1990’s, websites were created using offline applications that generated all the site’s HTML pages which were then uploaded to a webserver to be served to users’ browsers. Later this model evolved to one in which the website pages were generated “on the fly” using server side technologies like Microsoft’s ASP Pages, PHP or Java’s Servlet/JSP frameworks. ...

Everyone needs email… itʼs what enables us to receive communications from e-commerce sites and other internet services. So when faced with the challenge of creating a personal email address, where do most people turn? Invariably, they choose GMail. On the surface GMail presents a very attractive solution for email. Itʼs pretty feature rich, it works reliably (except in China!) and itʼs normally free for personal use. This is fine as long as you realise that you are the commodity when using free services like this. ...

This post is about working with multiple Github repos from different Github accounts on the same local machine. The easiest way to authenticate yourself when you pull from or push changes to Github is using SSH. To do so, you need to generate an SSH keypair on your local machine and add the public part of the keypair to your Github account as a new SSH key. Once this is done, you will be able to pull and push to your repo(s) using SSH automagically and without being continually prompted to authenticate. ...

When you provision a new server or VPS, there are a few steps you should take to make access to the server both secure and less painful. 1. Update the server Update the server using the latest packages. On Ubuntu execute the following commands (as root): apt-get update 2. Don’t login as root The first time you login into your (new) server, you should use the root account for updating the server and creating a new user. ...