• Checkin to Single O Hamacho

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    in Chuo, Tokyo, Japan
    Woke up late, but still getting my coffee. First cup of the day is always the best.

  • Running Tanzawa with Fly.io

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    Taking a page out of Simon Willison's Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder presentation, I'm going to write a blog post about what I've done on my projects as part of the "unit of work".

    One of the largest hurdles to running Tanzawa is one that plagues any Django app: getting it setup properly on a server. This usually involves connecting to a server, setting up a gunicorn or uWSGI server to run the app, editing nginx configurations, and fiddling with systemd, at a minimum.

    Each of these are a large barrier to entry. All of them combined means only the most dedicated users would attempt to use it. And the reality is nobody will use it.

    Making Tanzawa easier to install and run has long been a goal of mine. For a while my approach was to basically automate my own setup on Digital Ocean. I attempted this with two puppet scripts: one, created an Ubuntu server that automatically applied security patches and installed Docker, and the second would build a Tanzawa image to run on the server. Using puppet would also allow flexibility for people to host wherever they wanted.

    Ultimately this approach was flawed because you'd still end up needing to maintain a server, even if it updates itself.

    Getting Tanzawa to run on a fully managed platform like Fly.io would lower the barrier to entry quite a bit as it would remove the need to maintain a server and fiddle with configuration files. After migrating my blog from a Digital Ocean to Fly.io, I documented how others can do the same.

    Hosting with Fly.io is now the recommended way to use Tanzawa.
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    I’ve migrated my site to fly.io. Let me know if anything is amiss.

  • The Week #126

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    • A week off of Twitter and I find I don't really miss it. There's also been a number of really good blog posts and videos about this current moment in social media / internet space and time. The one that I'm finding that resonates the most with me is PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet.
    • I got Tanzawa running, or at least 500ing on on fly.io. This time next week, I should hopefully have my blog off of my own server and on to fly.io, hopefully with some instructions for how you can do the same as well. 

      This is one task that's been eating at me for a while. There's been some features that I've wanted that would require background tasks and or cron jobs. Processing tasks/cronjobs in my current setup would require me to add more processes to the server and is a non-starter, so I've been at an impasse. I'm using uWSGI to run Tanzawa on Fly, like I do with Sunbottle, which solves the background task issue as well. I'm excited about working on Tanzawa again. 
    • We've been going to the park near our house more on the weekends. Leo has gotten good enough at riding his bike that he can go down the hills using his brakes. For the uphill portion of the journey, I usually push him on the back to give him a boost. This weekend we practiced going up the hill while standing and pedaling, which got him further than he usually does. I really enjoy watching him just cruse around the park on his bike from area to area – it's almost like an extension of his being.
    • While at the park, the firemen from the fire station across the street invited us over and let the kids sit inside the fire engine (both the full size and the small kei-version). The fire station also got delivery of a new ambulance (set to replace the current one), but we couldn't see inside that one, not even they've been in it yet.
    • Last night around story time, rather than laying down in his spot to listen to stories, Leo was trying to avoid going to sleep so he laid on me and told me to read to him there. Of course that's not going to happen because we both can't see the book at the same time. I told him lights out (no story) unless he lays in his spot. He didn't move, so I turned off the lights and he did something he hasn't done since he was a newborn: he fell asleep laying on my chest 🥰. Back in those days he was much smaller and couldn't even cover my torso. Now, he's well past my knees. I let him lay there for a while before moving him over so I could relive the "old" days and think happy thoughts.

  • 🔗 How to Weave the Artisan Web

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    Everyone should start blogging again. Own your own site. Visit all your friends' sites. Bring back the artisan, hand-crafted Web. Sure, it's a little more work, but it's worth it. You don't even need to stop using social media! It's a "yes, and" situation, not a "no, but" one.
    Agree with this 100%. Having “The Week” is what has kept me blogging and building my own site.
    1. Tagged with
    2. blogging
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